JAMES KEIVOM/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Knickerbocker Village on the Lower East Side is one of the first places in the city to install FST21.
There’s a scene in “Minority Report” where Tom Cruise gets retina transplants so he can sneak by security scanners all over the city of the future.
That city of the future has already arrived in New York — but it’ll take a whole lot more than a new pair of peepers to trick this setup.
An Israeli general is at work on a “biometric security” system that he believes will have New Yorkers tossing out their keys and maybe ditching their doormen, too.
Using sophisticated scanners that can recognize a person’s face, voice, build and stride, the system can unlock your door in under two seconds. Any strangers not in the database will be denied access.
“This is only the beginning,” says General Aharon Farkash, the founder and president of the firm FST21. “This is the way people will enter buildings in the 21st century.”
To help establish FST21 in the states, Farkash opened a North American office earlier this month at 7 World Trade Center. Should you drop by, you’ll be greeted by one of its security devices. But unless he’s beamed a code to your phone or you work there already, there’s no convincing the small 8-inch scanner to let you in.
The device looks simple on the outside, and in practice it is, essentially turning everyone into a human-size key.
“Just like a fingerprint, we all look and act in a unique way,” Farkash says.
“Biometric” technology has been around since the 1970s, and is often seen in thumb-print readers and retinal scanners. But thanks to less-invasive techniques, biometrics is starting to take off.
“People have been talking about this for decades as the future, but I think the technology is finally good enough and invisible enough that people will start to embrace it,” says Robert McCrie, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the former director of the school’s Security Management Institute.
McCrie estimates as many as 50 startups are chasing the biometric security business, though FST21 is one of the few currently pursuing residential applications. Commercial installations are more common. For example, Citibank has been experimenting with biometric recognition to reduce the number of security guards at some branches.
McCrie also points to the iPhone’s new thumb pads as a sign people are comfortable, even cool, with biometrics.
“Thumb scanners used to freak people out, because they thought they were having their fingerprints taken,” McCrie says. “Now it’s the cutting edge because Apple’s doing it.”
Farkash points out that his system doesn’t try to find bad guys and flag them, but rather identifies the good guys and lets them pass through busy lobbies or secluded household doorways.
Users basically make a few turns in front of a special camera, which captures their face, voice and movement. Those details then get stored in a database.
Have a guest coming over? No problem. Just enter them into the system, which sends them a special QR code (those new square bar codes). They simply hold a smartphone to the FST21 reader and the door unlocks.
Farkash says he was inspired to create his company after retiring from the head of Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence, basically the country’s NSA, in 2006. He had held the job since 2001, and his tenure coincided with the Second Intifada, when thousands of Palestinians and Israelis died in street fights, riots, suicide bombings and military engagements.
Farkash believes the rise of terrorism, personal technology and growing urbanization will converge to make systems like his a necessity of modern life.
JAMES KEIVOM/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Brian Fishler, sales manager for FST21, demonstrates a new biometric system at Knickerbocker Village.
“Cities are crowded, often dangerous places, with the gap between rich and poor growing,” Farkash says. “We need a way to live safely but also comfortably next door to one another.”
For those worried about privacy as well as security, Farkash stresses that the system is self-contained, so it is impossible to hack from outside. It also stores no data of users coming and going beyond two weeks.
“I was the Israeli NSA, so I can tell you I know privacy, and the best effort is being made to keep things private,” Farkash says.
Beyond safety, the system’s selling point is its simplicity.
“You have to find a way to have security with convenience, or else people won’t want to use it, and then they won’t be safe,” he says.
FST21 uses facial, voice and movement recognition to ID people.
FST21 is far from ubiquitous, but it does seem to be catching on.
The first two installations launched in 2009, a W hotel-condo in Tel Aviv and a Jewish girls day school in Los Angeles.
“The school has had more than 800 identifications a day for three years without a single problem,” Farkash says.
Since then, FST21 has expanded to almost 40 locations, including hubs like Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport and an apartment building in Cameroon. At São Paolo’s newest soccer stadium, VIPs and season ticket holders will soon be programmed into the system to skip ticket and security lines.
In New York locales, including affordable housing complexes like Knickerbocker Village on the Lower East Side and Taino Towers in East Harlem, complaints about intruders have fallen by half. In addition to the 7 World Trade Center installation, a few offices at 1166 Sixth Ave. also features the system.
MICHAEL APPLETON
Harlem’s Taino Towers installed FST21. Visitors can use their phones to gain entry to the building.
For individual homeowners, it offers the convenience — and cool factor — of not having to fumble for the keys anymore, especially with the kids and groceries in hand. For condo and co-op boards, it could mean serious savings.
“It’s much cheaper than a doorman,” Farkash says. “To have 24-seven coverage, that’s four shifts a day, at least $250,000 a year. Our system is 70% less to install, and 90% less to maintain each year after that.”
If it sounds weird, Farkash simply says, “Wait.”
“Remember the first Motorola phones were huge and hugely expensive; only the wealthiest people had them,” Farkash says. “Now everyone’s got one in their pocket. We want to do the same thing to your door.”
City doormen and security guards have a different reaction.
“We provide way more services than just screening visitors,” says Enrique Calo, a doorman with 29 years of experience who works on the Upper West Side. “We hail cabs, we shovel snow, we hold packages; we’ll even watch the kids while you run out to the bodega.
“I’d like to see a computer do that,” he added.
JAMES KEIVOM/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
This deceptively simple scanner can recognize anyone.
Credit to Nydailynews
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/real-estate/biometrics-future-21st-century-security-article-1.1621948#ixzz2uStBu47S
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