Paying With The Palm Of Your Hand

Student gets his hand scanned at York Dining Hall. The new biometric hand scanning technology allows students to access meal plans without having to use a MaineCard.

University of Maine Dining Services is testing a program for entry to its facilities that could replace the use of MaineCards with a “hands-on” experience for students with meal plans.

Over the next month, Dining Services will be testing a pilot program that uses a scan of an individual’s palm in place of his or her MaineCard. The program uses infrared technology to recognize the meal plan user’s palm and links that image to that person’s MaineCard account.

“Instead of swiping your MaineCard, the program is going to identify you by the palm of your hand,” said Benny Veenhof, director of technology management at UMaine. “It takes a snapshot of the veins and creates a black pattern that it then converts into an encrypted algorithm.”

Veenhof said each hand scanner will resemble a bucket and will be placed next to the cash register. Upon checkout, students will be asked to place their hands in the bucket, allowing the scanner to read their palms in seconds.

The computer will have access to all of a student’s meal plan information. Students with resident meal plans will have to sign up for the program and have their hand scanned into the database at no cost in order to use meal plans next fall.

Dining Services advertised times last week for students wanting to register early. The staff plans to offer more registration periods during new student orientations as well. Students who did not make last week’s sign-ups can get their hands scanned in the Student Service Center on the first floor of the Memorial Union.

Veenhof said the registration process should be easier than obtaining a new MaineCard. Students who scanned their hands into the database last week will be part of the pilot program for the rest of the semester.

“This is a pilot program, as we are testing its effectiveness out for the next month,” said Kathy Kittridge, director of operations for Black Bear Dining. “We anticipate it will be successful but want to be sure it will work for our needs, so we have introduced this now through the rest of the semester.”

She hopes the trial period this spring will help Dining Services work out any kinks in the system.

“We do have 650 people signed up to trial it through the semester,” Kittridge said. “If people have concerns, I welcome them to contact me so that I can address those.”

Veenhof said the purchase and installation of the hand-scan technology will cost roughly $5,000 — a relatively inexpensive cost, according to his calculations.

“It’s not as if Dining Services spent a lot of money on this,” Veenhof said. “We’re using our existing system as is. It is just a little addition which translates your palm into your MaineCard number at the register.”

In order to pick the right program, Veenhof said he and other staff members traveled to multiple universities to investigate what was being used at these locations. He pointed out most of the systems they looked into would require a new computer system. Along with installation expenses, the program could cost more than $15,000.

“This technology, believe it or not, is being used all over the country in middle schools in lunch programs for small kids,” Veenhof said. “It intrigued us that it is a middlewear solution, so we can just plug it into our existing [system] so it is a lot cheaper that way and it is as secure and safe as can be.”

The hand-scan program is one of several changes Dining Services will be making to its operations by next year. These changes include an unlimited meal plan that allows students to eat as many times as they like throughout the day at the Hilltop, York and Wells dining commons.

“We’re going to be changing to a new, unlimited meal plan for next year,” Kittridge said. “This program will help us with the speed of our service as well as accurately identifying students on meal plans.”

Student gets his hand scanned. The new biometric hand scanning technology allows students to access meal plans without having to use a MaineCard.

The new hand-scan program is being implemented in hopes of preventing students from passing MaineCards on to others so they can receive free meals. In the long run, ensuring a student’s meal plan is only used by that student will save Dining Services money and keep prices as low as possible.

“This system allows us to accurately identify the meal plan holder for this plan,” Kittridge said. “The more misuse of MaineCards and meal plans means the higher the cost for Dining Services, which eventually causes us to have to raise prices.”

Kittridge added that Dining Services plans to maintain prices for meal plans with no increase for next year. The hand-scan program is a major factor in making this financially possible. She explained that the misuse of a meal plan by one student could cost UMaine thousands of dollars.

“If the meal plan purchaser shares their meal plan for the full year with someone else by passing off their MaineCard, this potentially increases our costs by $4,100 just on this one misuse alone,” Kittridge said, adding that this system will help eliminate such misuse. “Those who purchase a meal plan will have three additional guest meals next year, which is the appropriate use for sharing a meal plan.”

She added that, along with the money the hand-scan system could save by helping to eliminate misuse, the speed of service and the convenience of the program helped make it an easy choice.

Kittridge said this program will not eliminate jobs for students because the cashier is still needed to validate the transaction at the register and MaineCards will still be needed for certain transactions involving Black Bear Bucks. She added that if for some reason a student cannot use the hand-scan system, a MaineCard would still be effective.

“The majority of the people I talked to saw how quick it was and thought it was kind of cool,” she said. “If you forget your MaineCard, you will always have your hand.”

Palm Vein Pattern Scan Technology

By mainecampus.com

The National Biometric ID Card

Sample

The Mark of the Beast or a foreshadowing of that system?

“This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666.”--Revelation 13:18

As technology grows more sophisticated and the government and its corporate allies further refine their methods of keeping tabs on the American people, those of us who treasure privacy increasingly find ourselves engaged in a struggle to maintain our freedoms in the midst of the modern surveillance state.

Just consider the many ways we’re already being monitored and tracked: through our Social Security numbers, bank accounts, purchases and electronic transactions; by way of our correspondence and communications devices--email, phone calls and mobile phones; through chips implanted in our vehicles, identification documents, even our clothing. Data corporations are capturing vast caches of personal information on you so that airports, retailers, police and other government authorities can instantly identify and track you. Add to this the fact that businesses, schools and other facilities are relying more and more on fingerprints and facial recognition to identify us. All the while, banks and other financial institutions must verify the identities of new customers and make such records of customer transactions available to the police and government officials upon request.

In recent years, this information glut has converged into a mandate for a national ID card, which came to a head with Congress’ passage of the REAL ID Act in 2005. REAL ID requires states to issue machine-readable drivers’ licenses containing a wealth of personal data. However, because the REAL ID Act has been opposed by many states due to its cost and implementation, we have yet to be subjected to a nationwide implementation of a national ID card. That may all change depending on what happens with the immigration reform bill now before Congress.

A centerpiece of the immigration bill as proposed by Senators Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is a requirement that all U.S. workers, citizen and resident alike, be required to obtain and carry biometric Social Security cards (national ID cards under a different name) in order to work within the United States. Attempting to appease critics of a national ID card, Schumer and Graham insist that “no government database would house everyone’s information” and that the “cards would not contain any private information, medical information, or tracking devices.” However, those claims are blatantly false. Indeed, this proposed biometric card is nothing more than an end-run around opposition to a national ID card.

Civil and privacy rights advocates, as well as liberal-, conservative-, and libertarian-leaning organizations, have long raised concerns that a national ID card would enable the government to track citizens and, thus, jeopardize the privacy rights of Americans. President Reagan likened a 1981 proposal to the biblical “mark of the beast,” and President Clinton dismissed a similar plan because it smacked of Big Brother.

Most recently, The Rutherford Institute and the American Civil Liberties Union, along with a host of other organizations, voiced their opposition to the biometric ID card. In a letter to both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate Judiciary Committees, Senate Finance Committee, House Ways and Means Committee and the White House, this coalition of groups declared that such a national ID card would “not only violate privacy by helping to consolidate data and facilitate tracking of individuals, it would bring government into the very center of our lives by serving as a government permission slip needed by everyone in order to work. As happened with Social Security cards decades ago, use of such ID cards would quickly spread and be used for other purposes--from travel to voting to gun ownership.” And the national biometric ID card would “require the creation of a bureaucracy that combines the worst elements of the Transportation Security Administration and state Motor Vehicle Departments.”

At a minimum, these proposed cards will contain a memory device that stores distinct--and highly personal--physical or biological information unique to the cardholder such as fingerprints, retina scan information, a mapping of the veins on the top of your hand, and so on. Eventually, other information, such as personal business and financial data, will probably also be stored on these cards. For the cards to be effective, an information storage system and central database, which will be managed by the government and its corporate handlers, will be required. That means a lot of taxpayer dollars will be used to create the ultimate tracking device to be used against American citizens.

As journalist Megan Carpentier reports, “The federal government wants to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, and force employees and employers still suffering from a recession to do the same, to create and make accessible to every employer a national database of the fingerprints of all Americans from the time they are 14 years old. And they want to do it in order to keep an estimated 11.9 million unauthorized immigrants -- less than 4 percent of the total population of theUnited States -- from accessing the job market.” Under threat of substantial fines by the government and in what promises to be a cumbersome, bureaucratic process, employers will have to purchase ID card scanning devices (or visit their local DMV) in order to scan the cards of every individual they wish to hire before that individual can be employed. What this amounts to, essentially, is a troubling system in which all Americans would have to get clearance from the federal government in order to get a job.

Furthermore, the law’s requirement that machine-readable technology be incorporated into the card opens the door for radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to be placed on the cards. RFID is a tiny, automatic identification system that enables data--in this case the private information of American citizens--to be transmitted by a portable device. This will provide the government with unprecedented access to American citizens’ personal information. In addition, RFID tags emit radio frequency signals that allow the government to track the movement of the cards, as well as the cardholders. In other words, wherever your card goes, so do the government monitors.

When all is said and done, the adoption of a national biometric ID card serves one purpose only: to provide the government with the ultimate control over the American people. As one commentator has remarked, this is a “naked government power grab.”

The time to resist is now. If we don’t, eventually, we will all have to possess one of these cards in order to be a functioning citizen in American society. Failing to have a biometric card will render you a non-person for all intents and purposes. Your whole life will depend on this card--your ability to work, travel, buy, sell, access health care, and so on.

What we used to call science fiction is now reality. And whether a national ID card is the mark of the Beast or the long arm of Big Brother, the outcome remains the same.

By John W. Whitehead