The Department of Homeland Security is about to embark on an ambitious project to add biometrics to its smart card identification system. Other government efforts have demonstrated that such projects can go horribly awry, but it also has the potential to profoundly change DHS for the better.
The exact path the agency takes, analysts say, depends on how well it prepares itself and possibly on how well it incorporates some new technical guidance.
In May, DHS issued a request for proposals to add facial, fingerprint and iris recognition capabilities to its ID system as part of a $102 million upgrade. The agency is seeking a new contractor to take over the ID management project currently overseen by XTec and establish a new biometric-based card system that complies with Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 (HSPD-12). The contractor would replace 161,924 personal identity verification (PIV) cards by the end of 2013 and another 116,172 in 2014, DHS officials said.
According to the agency, the winning contractor would also install enrollment and issuance stations at as many as 300 DHS locations to manage at least 300,000 PIV cards. Those locations could include sites outside the United States.
Accenture Federal Services, Booz Allen Hamilton,Deloitte, General Dynamics Information Technology, Northrop Grumman, Science Applications International Corp. and Unisys have all expressed interest in the project.
Biometric challenges
Many agencies are meeting HSPD-12's requirement for physical and logical access to their buildings and computer systems, but few have been adequately incorporating biometric capabilities. DHS' project takes that bull by the horns, but not without risk.
Heidi Shey, an analyst at Forrester Research who covers security and risk markets, said the relatively short timeline for completing such a large project could lead to big problems if sound planning is not done upfront. For the agency to avoid trouble down the road, it should be working on — or, better yet, completing — programs that establish enrollment processes for employees, define what kind of information each employee needs embedded in his or her card, and create backup plans in case of failure, she added.
DHS is hard at work on that kind of due diligence, said Jim Williams, senior vice president of business development at Daon. The software and professional services company is helping India's government develop and manage a national biometric-based ID program. The project, which aims to issue identity cards for roughly 1.4 billion people, enrolls about 1 million people a day, taking fingerprint, iris and facial images from each. Those images are stored in a massive central database.
FCW
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