Archive for the 'property seizure' Category
California DMV considering facial recognition
Proposed $63M facial recognition contract would help flag applicants applying for fraudulent licenses
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San Jose Mercury News (CA)
via NewsEdge Corporation
Feb. 4–SACRAMENTO — Even as cost-conscious Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger looks to trim state spending every way he can, officials at the Department of Motor Vehicles are planning to spend tens of millions of dollars on new driver’s license technology.
And privacy advocates say finances are the least of the plan’s problems.
The proposed $63 million contract includes facial recognition software that would allow the DMV to quickly compare an applicant’s new photo against other photos in the agency’s database in an effort to deter identity theft. The system could eventually include as many as 25 million images of drivers statewide.
Similar software is used in Oregon, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado and Georgia. California DMV officials say that by flagging applicants who already have a license under a different name, the software has led to a reduction in fraudulent licenses and identification cards by as much as 10 percent in those states.
But the five-year contract, which is being fast-tracked and could be approved as early as next month, is drawing objections from privacy advocates who fear state and local authorities could use the biometric technology to monitor the movements of “innocent people” — for instance, spectators at a sporting event or an anti-war rally.
“What this would allow law enforcement to do is scan a crowd of folks, check that image against the database and have their names and addresses,” said Valerie Smalls
Navarro of the American Civil Liberties Union in Sacramento.
The ACLU is fighting the proposal with a handful of other groups, including Consumers Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Consumer Federation of California, which says the plan poses “massive threats” to personal privacy.
“We see this as sort of creeping Big Brother government, an invasion of people’s privacy,” said Richard Holober, executive director of the San Mateo-based Consumer Federation of California.
The DMV says privacy concerns are overblown because, under its interpretation of state law, police departments don’t have “open access” to the current database that contains drivers’ information.
When police need to track down a license holder’s address or driving record, said Dennis Clear, a DMV assistant director for legislation, they must request it from the department. Similarly, police would have to ask in order to check a suspect’s picture against the new database. The database is protected, he said, “and that’s not going to change.”
If anything, Clear said, the new system will significantly improve privacy. “We believe this new contract is in the best interest of the citizens; it is in the best interest of all of us.”
But the proposal also is eliciting criticism for the hasty manner in which it’s being driven through the state’s bureaucracy — using an expedited process for select budget items that can be funded without the scrutiny of public hearings.
The state Department of Finance, which allocates the DMV’s budget, is processing the contract proposal through a so-called Section 11 application, which in many cases allows for a speedy, 30-day approval. The state would be able to sign the contract after Feb. 14, unless the Legislature intervenes before then, and the biometric features could be in place as early as 2010.
The current contract to manufacture driver’s licenses expires in June. Under that contract, the state pays 65 cents for each license. The new contract will push the price to $1.40 per card, which amounts to $63 million in a five-year period, Clear said.
“We feel it’s worth it as an investment because, frankly, the system we have today is wearing out,” Clear said. “We have cameras that are no longer functioning, we have hardware that is breaking down.”
State officials turned to the fast-track process — instead of waiting for the state budget to be approved in what has become an increasingly drawn-out process — because they say California desperately needs to improve security features on its licenses.
Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, perhaps the most outspoken lawmaker when it comes to privacy issues, is urging his colleagues to put the contract proposal before a public hearing, where DMV officials could provide more details about the facial recognition technology.
“There are at least four questions I want to ask,” Simitian said. They are: Does the technology work? How much does it cost? Does it make the public safer? How will privacy be protected?
“None of those questions should be avoided or evaded by doing an end around the process, which is really what’s being proposed here,” Simitian said.
Wednesday, he formally asked the Joint Legislative Budget Committee to reject the finance department’s fast-track application for the contract.
Committee spokesman John Ferrera said the committee is aware of the concerns raised by the application and is “giving the request consideration.”
Police Agencies in Texas Stealing Property from People Who Haven’t Even Been Charged with Criminal Activity
Author: goldironSource: Express News
TENAHA — A two-decade-old state law that grants authorities the power to seize property used in crimes is wielded by some agencies against people who never are charged with — much less convicted of — criminal activity.
Law enforcement authorities in this East Texas town of 1,000 people seized property from at least 140 motorists between 2006 and 2008, and, to date, filed criminal charges against fewer than half, according to a review of court documents by the San Antonio Express-News.
Virtually anything of value was up for grabs: cash, cell phones, personal jewelry, a pair of sneakers, and often, the very car that was being driven through town.
Some affidavits filed by officers relied on the presence of seemingly innocuous property as the only evidence that a crime had occurred.
Linda Dorman, an Akron, Ohio, great-grandmother had $4,000 in cash taken from her by local authorities when she was stopped while driving through town after visiting Houston in April 2007. Court records make no mention that anything illegal was found in her van. She’s still hoping for the return of what she calls “her life savings.”
Dorman’s attorney, David Guillory, calls the roadside stops and seizures in Tenaha “highway piracy,” undertaken by a couple of law enforcement officers whose agencies get to keep most of what was seized.
Guillory is suing officials in Tenaha and Shelby County on behalf of Dorman and nine other clients whose property was confiscated. All were African-Americans driving either rentals or vehicles with out-of-state plates.
Guillory alleges in the lawsuit that while his clients were detained, they were presented with an ultimatum: waive your rights to your property in exchange for a promise to be released and not be criminally charged.
He said most did as Dorman did, signing the waiver to avoid jail.
The state’s asset seizure law doesn’t require that law enforcement agencies file criminal charges in civil forfeiture cases. It requires only a preponderance of evidence that the property was used in the commission of certain crimes, such as drug crimes, or bought with proceeds of those crimes.
That’s a lesser burden than is required in a criminal case. And it allows police departments and prosecutors to divvy up what they get from such seizures — what critics say is a built-in incentive for unscrupulous, underfinanced law enforcement agencies to illegally strip motorists of their property.
Some lawmakers, fed up with calls from irate constituents, say enough is enough. Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, said the state’s asset forfeiture law is being abused by enough jurisdictions across the state that he wants to rewrite major sections of it this year.
“The idea that people lose their property but are never charged and never get it back, that’s theft as far as I’m concerned,” he said.
Sen. Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, D-McAllen, believes some law enforcement agencies in his cash-strapped district in the Rio Grande Valley have become so dependent on the profitable seizures that they routinely misapply the state’s civil forfeiture law.
“In a lot of cases, they’re more focused on trying to find the money than in trying to find the drugs,” he said.
That means law enforcement agencies in the Valley tend to target vehicles heading south into Mexico rather than northbound cars, Hinojosa said, because the southbound vehicles are more likely to be transporting cash — the profits from the drug trade — as opposed to just the drugs.
In 2008, three years after stripping a man of $10,032 in cash as he drove south along U.S. 281 to buy a headstone for his dying aunt, Jim Wells County officials returned the man’s money — and the county then paid him $110,000 in damages as part of a settlement. Attorney Malcolm Greenstein said criminal charges never were filed against his client, Javier Gonzalez, nor any of the dozens of people whose records he reviewed. People were given the option of going to jail or signing a waiver, Greenstein said. Like Gonzalez, most signed the waiver.
Cash-poor Tenaha
Supporters tout the state’s forfeiture law, when used right, as an essential law enforcement tool, allowing state and local departments the ability to go after criminals — using the crooks’ money. Law enforcement agencies last year captured tens of millions of dollars from such seizures statewide, according to records from Whitmire’s office.
But in Tenaha, a town of chicken farms that hugs the Louisiana border, critics say being a black out-of-towner passing through with anything of value is seen as evidence of a crime.
Tenaha Mayor George Bowers, 80, defended the seizures, saying they allowed a cash-poor city the means to add a second police car in a two-policeman town and help pay for a new police station.
“It’s always helpful to have any kind of income to expand your police force,” Bowers said.
Local police, he said, must take aggressive action to stem the narcotics trade that flows through town via U.S. 59 — drugs heading north, cash going south.
“No doubt about it. (U.S. 59) is a thoroughfare that a lot of no-good people travel on. They take the drugs and sell it and take the money and go right back into Mexico,” said Bowers, who’s been Tenaha’s mayor 54 years.
Bowers said he’d defer questions about whether innocent people were being stripped of their property to Shelby County District Attorney Lynda Russell.
Russell couldn’t be reached for comment, and her attorney declined comment.
Randy Whatley, a local constable who himself deposited more than $115,000 into the county’s seizure account for fiscal year 2007 (state records show $45,000 eventually was returned to its owners), also couldn’t be reached for comment.
Russell, Whatley and Bowers are among a half-dozen officials named in Guillory’s lawsuit.
Waiving rights
Harris County District Attorney Patricia Lykos said the state’s forfeiture law, which last year put millions in the coffers of local law enforcement agencies, including hers, takes some of the profit out of crime.
“These ill-gotten gains are used to further the aims of law enforcement and public safety,” she said. “It’s kind of poetic justice, isn’t it?” Lykos said she believes the law, if followed, provides residents with adequate safeguards. Rarely, she said, do seizures take place locally without the filing of criminal charges.
She added that the most perfect law in the world could be sullied by the individuals carrying it out.
“It goes to the integrity of the people enforcing the law,” Lykos said.
An official with Bexar County District Attorney Susan Reed’s office did not return a call for comment.
Several now-former district attorneys in Texas already have landed in hot water over their use, or misuse, of their forfeiture accounts. Before his primary defeat last year, then-Montgomery County District Attorney Michael McDougal acknowledged spending hundreds from the fund on alcohol for a community event, and thousands more on staff parties and donations to charities.
The law stipulates that seized money be used for law enforcement purposes but doesn’t specify what those are.
Key lawmakers say more oversight is needed everywhere in the process. The apparent practice in Tenaha of presenting waivers just after people’s property is seized raises troubling questions about how the law is applied there.
The Shelby County district attorney made legal agreements with some individuals that her office wouldn’t file criminal charges so long as the property owner waived all rights to the valuables.
“In exchange for (respondent) signing the agreed order of forfeiture, the Shelby County district attorney’s office agrees to reject charges of money laundering pending at this time,” read one waiver, dated April 10, 2007.
The property owners named in the waiver had just signed over $7,342 in cash, their 1994 Chevrolet Suburban, a cell phone, a Blackberry and a stone necklace. The law forbids a peace officer at the time of seizure to “request, require or in any manner induce any person ….. to execute a document purporting to waive the person’s interest in or rights to the property.”
In Monroe, La., Jason Clemons, an unemployed 36-year-old, says he’d desperately like to reclaim the $3,500 in cash authorities in Tenaha seized from him when the car in which he was a passenger was stopped in 2007 and a marijuana roach was found in the ashtray.
A judge threw out a money laundering charge against him a while back, but his attorneys told him it’s too late to reclaim his money. “If you ask me, they’re running a scam from the district attorney’s office to the police,” Clemons said. “I’m in a real good bind. It’d be nice to see that money.”
Source: GW’s Blog
The head of the World Trade Organization is warning of financial crash-induced unrest.
As quoted by AFP:
The global economic crisis could trigger political unrest equal to that seen during the 1930s, the head of the World Trade Organization (WTO) said in a German newspaper interview Saturday.
“The crisis today is spreading even faster (than the Great Depression) and affects more countries at the same time,” Pascal Lamy told the Die Welt newspaper.***
“This crisis weighs heavily on politics and puts peace in danger,” he said.
He joins many others in warning that the economic crisis could lead to food riots, unrest or even revolution, including:
- The head of the International Monetary Fund
- Senator Christopher Dodd
- Leading economist Nouriel Roubini
- Top trend researcher Gerald Calente
Of course, there is already rioting in Europe. But things could get a lot worse, and spread internationally.
Lee Rogers On Overnight America w/ Jon Grayson Discussing The FEMA Camp Bill
Below is an mp3 file of Lee Rogers as a guest on the syndicated CBS Radio show, Overnight America w/ Jon Grayson discussing HR 645 or the National Emergency Centers Act which authorizes existing facilities to be used as National Emergency facilities as well as the Homeland Security Secretary to build additional FEMA facilities on open and closed military bases.
Typical of the mainstream media, Jon attempts to debunk the significance of this legislation by ignoring obvious patterns of past behavior by the government in preserving and setting up detention facilities under the guise of illegal immigration, continuity of government and more. He also ignores the fact that the government does not follow the Constitution and is engaged in a myriad of criminal activity. For example, the John Yoo torture memo which was obviously unconstitutional and broke international law, was used to justify the torture of so called terrorists by the criminal Bush regime. The same type of thinking could easily be applied if HR 645 is passed into law.
Jon claims that the provision in the bill which authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to use these facilities for whatever purposes they deem to be necessary is irrelevant because it doesn’t authorize the government to break the law. Since when has the government followed the Constitution which is the supreme law of the land? They break the law all the time. The argument is null and void.
He also references the Wannsee Conference which was a meeting of high level Nazi officials to discuss the concentration camp plan for the Jews during World War II. It was a meeting whose contents were kept top secret throughout the war. Hitler never came out and told the people that he was building death camps, but like in America today he incrmentally and quietly built the infrastructure necessary to carry out what was codenamed the Final Solution. The point is, is that the plan was secret which he fails to mention.
S.C. becomes focal point to track funds for gangs, narcotics
South Carolina’s political and military leaders fear that U.S. street gangs are conspiring with international terrorists, an alarming scenario they said highlights the need for a specialized unit that targets major drug runners and their bankrollers.
And they want the South Carolina National Guard to run the federally-funded pilot program.
U.S. Reps. Joe Wilson and Henry Brown, both Republicans, have asked U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to back the creation of a military unit that would bridge a perceived security gap between the international drug trade and the war on terror.
“The National Guard has the capacity and the authority to play a unique role in our nation’s counter-narcotics mission,” Wilson told The Post and Courier. “The counter-narcotics pilot program would specifically target the illicit finance generated by the narcotics industry here at home and abroad which is used to fund terrorist operations around the world.”
Proponents said a successful program in South Carolina could serve as a national model and that several factors make the state a strategic location to set up shop:
–The state boasts an abundance of major military installations and resources that already serve key national security roles, including Charleston Air Force Base and its fleet of C-17s, Charleston’s port and the Navy brig, which has housed terrorism suspects.
–Organized gangs with international ties already are operating in the state. One of these organizations, the notorious Mara Salvatrucha-13 (MS-13), has possible links to hostile groups in Afghanistan and the Middle East, according to Wilson and Brown.
–Wilson cites a new report by the Congressional Research Service on the emerging international threat posed by the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs. The report states that “alarms have been sounded in some circles that international terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda could exploit alien and narcotics smuggling networks controlled by these gangs to infiltrate the United States.”
–The state National Guard already is working in some counter-narcotics programs, and its citizen soldiers are accustomed to collaborating in drug investigations with state and local law enforcement.
But questions remain. Among them: How strong is the evidence linking terrorists, gangs and drug-trafficking? How would this new program square with existing federal, state and local drug enforcement efforts? And is South Carolina the best place for this mission?
The gang connection
Gang activity in South Carolina has increased steadily over the past decade as these criminal organizations have spilled from urban centers into rural and suburban nooks across the nation in search of new territory and customers.
In 2004, the state Law Enforcement Division had identified 84 groups in South Carolina that fit a general definition of a gang: an organized group of five or more people who adopt a common name and engage in crime. By 2007, that figure had ballooned to 325 identified gangs, authorities said.
The number of crimes attributed to gangs has mushroomed as well. In 2007, gangs were linked to more than 950 crimes in South Carolina, including drug trafficking. By comparison, 370 gang-related crimes were reported statewide in 2001, according to SLED.
Many of these groups are what police describe as “hybrid gangs,” small, independent groups connected by turf or friendship. But highly organized gangs with cross-border connections also are present — gangs such as MS-13, Surenos, 18th Street and the Mexican Mafia.
“The number of Hispanic gangs is drastically growing,” said Special Agent Nicole Bryan, SLED’s coordinator on gangs in the Midlands. “As the Hispanic community has grown, Hispanic gangs have increased as part of that growth.”
Across the country, MS-13 and other gangs increasingly have become involved in narcotic trafficking at the wholesale level. They’ve cultivated connections with Mexican drug cartels and other power criminal organizations to gain access to international suppliers and large- volume shipments, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center. These affiliations have increased the availability of illegal drugs and the profits flowing out of the country.
The revenue stream is huge, with traffickers employing myriad of methods to launder and smuggle drug money to foreign destinations. The drug intelligence center estimates that Mexican and Colombian drug traffickers generate and launder as much as $39 billion in wholesale profits annually, much of which is smuggled out of the United States along the Mexican border.
Over the years, South Carolina has emerged as a key distribution point in this narcotics pipeline, serving as a smuggling route for drugs from California, Florida, Georgia, New York, Texas and Mexico. South Carolina’s location along Interstates 95 and 85, between New York and Florida, makes it ideal for drug runners shipping marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin along the Eastern Seaboard, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
“Project 9496″
The pilot program would target this stealthy underworld of drugs and money. The new unit is shrouded in secrecy, with scant details of its origin, funding and status. The Pentagon refers to the program as “Project 9496.”
Col. Pete Brooks, director of public affairs for the S.C. National Guard, said it’s too early to talk about the effort in detail. “We are not even out of the blocks yet. This whole new mission is at the ‘good idea’ stage and is not funded.”
But a Jan. 14 letter from Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard J. Douglas to the National Guard Bureau indicates the pilot program already is approved. The letter states that the South Carolina Counter Narco-Terrorism Pilot Program is to be run and funded separately from an existing network of states’ National Guard counter-drug units.
Brooks said the pilot program would expand the South Carolina Guard’s anti-drug unit, which employs 40 full-time employees and hires about a dozen temporary workers each summer to help destroy marijuana crops.
The program receives about $1.6 million in federal money each year in support of the drug eradication efforts of SLED and local police agencies. How the two agencies would partner under the pilot program is unclear because SLED considers it only “an idea at this point,” according to a statement the agency issued in response to questions from the newspaper. Exactly how much the program would cost also remains unclear.
The letters of support from Brown and Wilson suggest that Gov. Mark Sanford also is pushing for the new mission. But Sanford’s press secretary, Joel Sawyer, said the governor was unaware of the proposal until The Post and Courier inquired about it.
After discussing the plans with state Guard officials, however, Sanford thinks the program is “an intriguing idea,” Sawyer said.
Still, the program’s status and future remains unclear. The National Guard Bureau said federal seed money was set aside only to study the program’s feasibility. The agency couldn’t provide a figure.
Tracking the money
Efforts to choke off terrorist financing began in earnest after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, with then President George W. Bush announcing two weeks later a “major thrust of our war on terrorism … a strike on the financial foundation of the global terror network.”
Within months, the U.S. government froze the assets of dozens of alleged terrorists, banks and nonprofit groups.
Investigators learned that al-Qaida financiers used everything from electronic transfers to camels to move money and fund their operations. Making matters even more challenging was the existence of the hawala system, a centuries-old money loan and transfer system that is based on the honor system among brokers across the world.
Unlike traditional banking systems, which leave trails of paper and records, hawalas typically don’t keep records of individual transactions.
But financing experts and government officials have said tracking down terrorism financiers has suffered in recent years. A report last year by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force said international efforts have had limited success and that the United States and other countries need to create new counter-terrorism techniques.
Reports by the Government Accountability Office in the past two years have said the nation needs an “integrated strategy to coordinate the delivery of counter-terrorism financing training.” A Pentagon report in 2007 called for “one over-arching organization” devoted to international terrorism financing.
John Cassara, a former CIA officer and U.S. Treasury Department agent, said the military in recent years has become more focused on narco-terrorists and their paymasters. He said that this emphasis is a natural outgrowth of the military’s efforts in Afghanistan, where most of the world’s opium is produced.
“We’ve seen over the years how the Taliban has used it to bankroll their operations,” said Cassara, author of “Hide & Seek - Intelligence, Law Enforcement and the Stalled War on Terror Finance.” “The classic line is that if you take away the money, there’s no terrorism. The military realizes this.”
But Cassara said he hasn’t seen any solid evidence showing connections between Latin American gangs and Central Asian and Middle Eastern terrorism. “Could it happen? Absolutely. Does it happen? Frankly I don’t know,” he said, adding that organized criminal gangs are “opportunists, and they will naturally reach out to organizations that can facilitate their operations.”
A recent assessment from the National Drug Intelligence Center reached a similar conclusion, saying such connections are possible but not supported by evidence. The report identified U.S. prison gangs that have spread outside the bars as having the most potential for relationships with terrorists.
While government officials know of no concrete connection between gangs selling drugs in the United States and Middle East terrorist groups, authorities have long known that terrorist organizations in South America, especially in Colombia, fuel much of their activity with drug money. And authorities say they have watched with growing concern as Nigerian criminal groups increasingly have brought drugs, some of it from the Middle East, into this country, including the Southeast.
Money may aid new festival, enforcement
As spring draws closer, the picture of how the city of Myrtle Beach is spending its anti-motorcycle-rally money is coming into focus. Read the rest of this entry »
Combining biometrics and sensors: Fingerprints and faces can be faked, but not brain patterns
Author: goldironSource: CORDIS
Since 9/11, the need to secure important facilities from terrorist attack has become a top priority around the world. And one of the keys to this is making sure the right people are allowed into sensitive areas and the wrong people are kept out.
A range of technologies and systems have been deployed in the past few years, but the more successful they are the more obtrusive they tend to be, causing disruptions and delays.
For the past three years, a consortium of academic and research institutions and private-sector companies have been looking at developing new technologies that aim at enhancing both security and safety across a wide spectrum of applications.
At the same time, they have been improving existing technologies with the aim of making recognition techniques much more unobtrusive.
Combining biometrics and sensors
At the heart of the EU-funded HUMABIO research project is combining new types of biometrics – methods used for the unique recognition of humans – with the latest sensor technologies.
As well as developing sensorial and connectivity hardware for specific biometric applications, the researchers had to come up with sophisticated new software to extract the biometric profile of individuals, based on physiology and behaviour characteristics. This is stored in a database and then compared to profiles created when individuals enter the monitored area.
Until now, the most widely used forms of biometric identification have been fingerprints, facial recognition and voice recognition, all of which can be faked. HUMABIO has introduced new forms of biometric recognition which are considerably more difficult to get around.
Headgear scans brainwaves
Uniquely, this includes using electrocardiograms (ECGs), which record heart rhythms, and electroencephalograms (EEGs), which record brain patterns, to identify people. The researchers have come up with prototype headgear which includes two electrodes to take the readings.
Unlike some of the other achievements of the project, this technology is still at pre-commercial, proof-of-concept stage and might take several years before becoming widely used.
“Unobtrusiveness was one of the most important aspects of what we were trying to achieve,” says project coordinator Dimitrios Tzovaras, “but a lot of work will need to be done on the EEG and ECG sensors to make them unobtrusive”.
The project is delighted with the results to date, however, and Tzovaras says: “This is the first time this type of biometrics has been used for identification, and it solves most of the problems other biometric systems face.”
Other new types of biometrics the project has been working on are much closer to commercialisation. These include analysis of gait, or the way people walk and carry themselves, and analysis of seated posture. The project has also been enhancing facial and voice recognition techniques, and putting everything together into a multimodal biometric identification system which is more secure than the unimodal biometrics that comprise it.
Successful pilot projects
The new technologies developed by HUMABIO were tested in three pilot projects. The first was in a truck provided by one of the project’s industrial partners, Volvo. It combined facial and voice recognition with posture recognition via a seat cover fitted with a new type of inbuilt sensor for analysing how the driver sits. The system continually updates the driver’s biometric information both to warn if there is a change of driver, possibly following a hijack, and to make sure the driver is fit to drive.
A second pilot was at the Euroairport in Basel, with voice, facial recognition and gait recognition being used to provide on-the-go authentication of airport personnel, such as security guards and airline pilots. The third demonstration, in a laboratory at Stuttgart, used biometric authentication to restrict access to a specific, high-value machine which can only be used by trained, authorised personnel.
“In the first pilot, the seat cover was as comfortable as a normal [one], and the facial and voice sensors did not bother the driver at all. In the other two pilots, people at the airport and lab were able to move around freely in the monitored areas while their identities were authenticated. The goal of unobtrusiveness was attained, while security and safety was considerably enhanced compared to conventional systems,” says Tzovaras.
The truck pilot was so successful that Volvo is now planning to install the authentication system on all its trucks, and other parts of the system, such as the enhanced facial recognition camera, are also on the way to being commercialsed.
While work is still needed on some of the technologies, there are working prototypes for all of them including EGC/EEG, which Tzovaras believes will one day be integrated into sophisticated biometric systems that terrorists and criminals will find it next to impossible to fool.
HUMABIO is funded under the ICT strand of the Sixth Framework Programme for research.
goldiron