Big Brother Inc.

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY AARON GOODMAN

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The FBI wants to use biometrics to fight the problem of anonymity among the men detained by the U.S. military. "The biometrics piece is critical," says Ed Worthington, recently the FBI's commander in Baghdad. "If they do try to come into this country at some point, we'll know instantaneously, and we'll be able to tell that the guy was detained for anticoalition activities. That's huge." FBI officials tell TIME that some insurgents have turned up with ordinary criminal records dating from their days as students or visitors. "That's good interrogation material, particularly if they claim they've never been in the States," says FBI assistant director Mike Kirkpatrick, head of the CJIS complex.

Identix is on the cutting edge of the field of facial-recognition software, a technology that will play an important role in biometric photos to be embedded in U.S. passports and those of other industrialized nations over the next few years. Mexico is using the technology in national elections. Colorado vets driver's license applicants using similar software made by Digimarc ID Systems.

Identix CEO Joseph Atick, a physicist who pioneered facial recognition in academia and then co-founded Visionics, which merged in 2002 with Identix, says the company's trademark software, FaceIt, is about to come out with a dramatic upgrade. Besides mapping the topography of the face, Atick says, the next-generation software will add a new dimension, skin texture, that will make the results far more accurate. "The canvas of the human skin is as unique as a fingerprint," he says. The software will map sectors of skin, noting the size and position of tiny features like pores. The result, he says, will produce an identification certainty that will be used to authenticate financial transactions in the global economy. In other words, it will be possible to know whether yours is a face that can be trusted.