U.S. Border Security at a Crossroads

Last fall, Stanford University researcher Lawrence M. Wein testified before Congress that US-VISIT, using IDENT, had no more than a 53 percent chance of catching a terrorist who had altered his or her fingerprints, even if that person was on a terrorist watch list. Wein said authorities should not assume the current two-fingerprint system is sufficient to stop terrorists. "It would be naive to think that these people are not trying to defeat the system," he said.

Rep. Norman D. Dicks (D-Wash.), who has repeatedly questioned IDENT's effectiveness, said homeland security officials should have listened to their experts rather than trying to upgrade the old fingerprint technology. Dicks said homeland security officials opted to use the flawed technology already in place to demonstrate they were making progress.

"They wanted to show they were getting something done," Dicks said. "The problem is, they made a mistake."

US-VISIT also incorporates another technology with interoperability problems: border-crossing cards that have been issued for years to Mexicans who want to visit and work in the United States. The cards are designed to encode the visitors' personal data electronically, but they do not work well with the IDENT system because the two technologies were not designed to interact, US-VISIT officials said.

The cards are manufactured at a six-year-old government plant run by a company called Datatrac Information Services Inc. in the congressional district of Rep. Harold Rogers (R-Ky.), the chairman of the House Appropriations homeland security subcommittee.

In the late 1990s, Rogers had urged government officials to build the card-manufacturing facility in his district, one of the poorest in the nation, according to a congressional aide who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Then, in June 2003, Rogers added language to an appropriations bill emphasizing that new card technology should not be adopted in a TSA pilot program as long as the existing technology is "good enough."

The next month, Datatrac received a 10-year contract extension worth up to $200 million, according to a company press release.

"The cards produced at facilities like the one in Corbin, Ky., are on the cutting edge of technology," Rogers was quoted as saying in the release. "I am pleased the Department has chosen to continue the use of these proven products."

A congressional aide said Rogers did not weigh in on Datatrac's behalf over the contract extension but considered it a "victory" because of the jobs it protected in the district Rogers represents.

The decision to stick with the cards comes with costs. This year, US-VISIT officials requested another $51 million for new technology, including equipment needed to study whether the cards can eventually work well with IDENT, Williams said.

Datatrac's border-crossing cards are often not used as intended, the homeland security department's inspector general reported this year. Border agents are supposed to run the cards through machines that can verify the visitors' identity. Instead, the agents often only eyeball the cards. The machines usually are installed away from the crossing points and used only with visitors who are pulled aside for additional screening.