PAKISTAN PRINTS

The State Department has awarded Lockheed Martin a $9.4 mil­lion con­tract to develop state-​​of-​​the-​​art fin­ger­print iden­ti­fi­ca­tion sys­tem to help Pakistan to quickly iden­tify sus­pected crim­i­nals and ter­ror­ists.

Where do I chip in?
The Pakistan Automated Fingerprint Identification System (PAFIS) com­prises a cen­tral fin­ger­print data­base, crim­i­nal his­tory sys­tem, and geo­graph­i­cally dis­trib­uted access sta­tions to serve police forces through­out the coun­try. PAFIS will link Pakistani law enforce­ment com­mu­nity with Interpol and national police agen­cies such as the FBI. The United States has a sim­i­lar pro­gram with the Republic of the Philippines.
Can you tell a “tented arch” (right) from a “whorl” (below)?

PAFIS is a vari­ant of a sim­i­lar sys­tems used by the FBI and the Defense Department, which use a soft­ware suite devel­oped using Red Hat Linux 7.3 run­ning on National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) clus­ters. Although the code is open-​​source, it is also export con­trolled. “It’s free, but it’s export con­trolled, which means if you get it out­side the U.S. or you post it on the Internet, the export con­trol peo­ple will come get you,” an NIST man­ager told NewsForge.
Um, yeah. The two coun­tries have lit­tle tra­di­tion of pro­tect­ing soft­ware. An esti­mated 83% of soft­ware in Pakistan and 72% in the Philippines, accord­ing to one study, are pirated (com­pared with twenty-​​two per­cent in the United States). Good luck with those export con­trols.
–Jeffrey Lewis

December 15th, 2004 | You can run... | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.