A Great Way To Use Biometric Technology

The following article entitled “After Katrina: Identifying the Dead with Biometric ID” from Forensic Magazine illustrates one of the many ways biometric technology can help us answer human problems:

Teams of forensic experts were among the first responders to help restore order amidst the chaos of the 2001 World Trade Center bombing, 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

But disaster management, in the U.S. as elsewhere, is clearly a work in progress. Systemic issues abound, and other aspects of the recovery process – namely the contribution of the forensic sciences – are handicapped by data shortfalls from the field.

In June 2005, the U.S. Department of Justice, in conjunction with the National Center for Forensic Science, took the important first step of issuing guidelines entitled “Mass Fatality Incidents: A Guide for Human Forensic Identification.”

The guide, in considering the full array of post-mortem data collection techniques – visual, anatomical and circumstantial evidence, dentition, fingerprints, and DNA – directed medical examiners to use “all available methods” to confirm victims’ identities. Click here for more.

Hopefully, more useful biometrics applications such as the one above will receive increased media exposure before the more senseless implementations (impossibly secured border checks, for example) ruin public support for the technology entirely.

This entry was posted on October 11 2007 at 00:39 and is filed under Disasters, Biometrics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.