Last week, a newspaper featured the next stage for our ultimate superiority in the War on Terrorism.

USA Today announced in its first page headline entitled "Face recognition next in terror fight" that "Homeland Security leaders are exploring futuristic and possibly privacy-invading technology aimed at finding terrorists and criminals by using digital surveillance photos that analyze facial characteristics.

The government is paying for some of the most advanced research into controversial face-recognition technology, which converts photos into numerical sequences that can be instantly compared with millions of photos in a database."  USA TODAY, May 10, 2007

This is great news!  Finally, an innovative solution has been conceived for a problem bothering all of us for years! Instead of paying thousands of employees to stand at crucial access points into the greatest empire on earth who ineffectively screen people, machines would take care of this important task and recognize the bad guys when they approach our homeland. So simple! Why hadn't anyone come up with this great idea years ago?

I truly regret whether a hint of sarcasm found its way to these lines. Brad Barker, CEO of The HALO Corporation liked this great news even more than I did and offered to sponsor a campaign calling all terrorists around the globe to submit their up-to-date snapshots to the government. The database USA Today mentions has to be populated somehow, doesn't it? 

How many terrorists do we really know about? How many can we identify before they engage in their last stage of evil planning and attack us? How many will we even know about then? What about mules? Yes, mules. These are the unsuspecting people used to deliver something bad onto a prospective target and will not appear in any database simply because they're not terrorists, nor are they criminals. They are ordinary people like any of us.

Pouring a fortune into technology that won't solve the problem is unnecessary. The technology inventors and their manufacturers will be the ones harvesting the fruits of this decision. Do you know how many machines will be needed nationwide or worldwide? There will also be others who can expect their businesses to flourish due to this decision.

When a terrorist who is planning to enter the country after submitting his snapshot to Brad, he knows he will be recorded onto the ‘wanted' database.  The terrorist or criminal will probably find a plastic surgeon to change his appearance and his file before he perpetrates his intended crime. Since the database would be inaccessible to plastic surgeons to verify whether their patients are cataloged as terrorists or criminals, an ordinary procedure such as a nose job might actually be a simple way to bypass this innovative technology.

Here are the downsides: Once a technology like this is deployed at access points to our homeland or any other protected environment, security and law enforcement personnel at these sites would automatically be reduced in their responsibilities. That's how it is with technology. The security staff won't look for suspicious individuals. They'll just look for the green or red lights the machines produce.

Another important point is that Brad Barker, despite his efforts, won't receive much response from his campaign. The bad guys are in the shadow because they don't want to be recognized. They aren't considered criminals or even terrorists as long as they are not engaged in violent activity (i.e., an actual attack) and therefore, their snapshots won't mean much. This machine will not illuminate the darkness for us. It will merely add more light to an area that is already well lit.

The not-so-small fortune could be spent more wisely on finding out what terrorists are doing and not who they are. Money should be prudently spent on preparing our security forces to better detect these bad guys and ultimately, deter them from achieving their objectives. A very small fraction of the investment could be spent on deterrence measures. The impact of deterrence methods would achieve more tangible results and increase security awareness in all of us.

Brad Barker and The HALO Corporation have decided to invest in the human element instead of the snapshots database. For their next The Art of Deterrence^TM workshop log into http://www.thehalocorp.com/.