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[Article] US Visa Waiver Program

  • 06-04-2007 5:09am
    #1
    Ruu_Old
    Closed Accounts Posts: 36,634 ✭✭✭✭


    Just some news I heard about the visa waiver program if anyone is interested. Michael Chertoff has apparently made a decision to allow the finger printing of ten fingers instead of two as it is right now. The below link is from a press conference on the US-VISIT program which included the Visa Waiver program. There is no date set for this transition from what I can find, so we can probably look forward to longer waiting times. \o/
    The question about ten fingerprints, Secretary Chertoff made the decision to move to ten fingerprints on enrollment for a simple reason and our National Institute of Science -- Standards and Technology, NIST, as part of Department of Commerce -- recommended this. As our database has grown, then we were concerned that we would get an unacceptable number of false positives. And it's a simple mathematical proposition that as you get more and more people to compare something to, you could get more false positives, which means they look like hits, but they're not.

    And so, to increase the accuracy and to make sure that travelers were not negatively impacted, we are going to move to taking ten fingerprints, so that as you take ten fingerprints, you can make sure you have a more accurate match, because you're providing more data against an ever-growing database. So, it's for accuracy purposes that we need to move there.

    In terms of when we would actually get there, we're working closely with the State Department to develop a comprehensive transition plan, a plan that would almost certainly include pilots where the State Department might start at some of their visa issuing posts, piloting taking ten prints. And then we would look at our ports of entry, probably look at piloting at our low volume ports of entry to begin with, to make sure that, again, we can improve the system by improving the accuracy, which enhances security and make sure the good people who may look like a match are correctly identified by the technology and don't need to be sent to secondary, where the false positive is a result by a human fingerprint examiner. We don't want that to happen. We want to be able to read people as we do today, very quickly.


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