WASHINGTON — When global crises strike, U.S. military leaders plot strategy inside a top-secret operations center that is secured by a door lock unlike anything else at the Pentagon.
No ordinary key will open the thick steel door. Rather, a laser scanner reads the index fingerprints of those who seek to enter and verifies their identities more surely than any identification card.
The computerized scanner, which works something like ones at the supermarket checkout counter, was pioneered for law enforcement. And now, inevitably, commercial enterprises are adapting the technology to mass markets.
In Houston, one of the nation's biggest law firms uses an automated fingerprint system to control access to its offices. Los Angeles County uses one to make sure that no one files for welfare benefits under different names.
This is nothing next to what the future might hold. Motorists someday may not need a key to start their cars, just a finger on a dashboard scanner. Plastic credit cards may give way to fingerprint systems that could eradicate fraud.
The glitzy technology also has a dark side: the potential to give government a Big Brother capability to keep an eye on individual citizens.
"We are looking at very serious proposals for creating a national identification system, and an automated fingerprint system is a big part of it," said Janlori Goldman, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, a civil liberties advocacy group. "The ability of the government to push a button and keep track of people will be astonishing."
But such concerns are not stopping companies from building up the new industry, particularly in its applications to law enforcement, which still represents its largest and most important use.
Defense contractors, starving for business, are pushing fingerprint systems for law enforcement agencies everywhere.
And the FBI is laying down the biggest bet of all. It is preparing to invest $520 million in a computerized system that will hold prints on 32 million criminals and suspects, allowing local police to check a suspect's fingerprints in two hours, instead of up to three weeks now.
Businesses that market fingerprint identification systems are seeing visions of dollar signs. "The worldwide potential is in the tens of billions of dollars," said Gary Mann, vice president of information systems at Lockheed Martin Corp. "We believe the company that gets the FBI program will be the predominant force in the world market."
