U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has purchased Integrated Biometrics’ Kojak livescan 10-fingerprint scanner for deployment to more than 5000 workstations within the United States Ports of Entry (Air, Land and Sea). These devices will support CBP’s ability to rapidly and accurately process the nearly 1 million individuals who enter the US each day. A majority of these newly-acquired Kojak scanners are already in operation at the nation’s busiest airports, including Atlanta, Chicago, Dulles, LAX and Miami. Thousands more will be installed in additional CBP facilities in the coming months.
The highly competitive award was completed only after extensive research and testing by the CBP, which chose IB’s Kojak Light Emitting Sensor (LES) technology scanners to replace the incumbent’s outdated glass-prism technology. Kojak scanners are easy to use, do not require costly silicon membranes or complex, time-consuming maintenance. In addition, LES fingerprint technology avoids racial bias found in facial recognition software. With IB’s LES technology, “every finger is blue”.
“We are extremely pleased to put the world’s best FAP-60 ten-finger scanner into the hands of US Customs and Border Protection – one of the largest and most important law enforcement agencies in the world,” said Stephen Thies, CEO of Integrated Biometrics. “Our biometric scanners have become the standard for governments around the globe and are now deployed in more than fifty nations on six continents. It’s rewarding to see CBP benefit from the unmatched mobility, ease of use and affordability our scanners provide.”
The 60,000 employees of the CBP take a comprehensive approach to border management and control, combining customs, immigration, border security and agricultural protection into one coordinated and supportive activity, and are charged with keeping terrorists and their weapons out of the U.S. while facilitating lawful international travel and trade. The CBP enforces hundreds of U.S. laws and regulations. Each day, the agency welcomes nearly a million visitors, screens more than 67,000 cargo containers, arrests more than a thousand suspects, and seizes nearly 6 tons of illicit drugs.
Integrated Biometrics FBI-certified fingerprint sensors play an important role in border and immigration control around the world as fixed, standalone implementations and when integrated into mobile or multimodal systems (tablets, kiosks, etc.). In addition to their use by CBP at ports of entry and at US borders, IB devices are currently used by border control authorities in Mexico, South Korea, Ukraine, Peru and elsewhere.
In addition to their use in border, immigration and other law enforcement applications, IB scanners are used around the world to ensure the security and delivery of important social services, including healthcare and voting systems, as well as in education, cellular phone system registration, humanitarian and disaster relief efforts, in-terminal airline boarding verification, and even to assure that beer buyers in sports stadiums are of legal drinking age.
