US-VISIT Director Robert Mocny recently was a foreign visitor himself — in Japan, where he experienced firsthand how that country’s border officials process the fingerprints of incoming and departing travelers.

“It is a very orderly process: You queue up to enter, and you queue up to exit,” Mocny said. “We don’t have that.”

But we soon will if Mocny succeeds in implementing the next phase of the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program. The Homeland Security Department’s largest ongoing information technology program has been allocated more than $1.8 billion since 2004. He said he intends to release a plan shortly for checking fingerprints of foreign visitors departing from U.S. airports.

The plan could open work on the initiative to more companies than just Accenture Ltd., the prime contractor on US-VISIT.

The border control program collects fingerprints from foreign visitors applying for U.S. visas. The fingerprints are screened against a database of criminals and suspected terrorists. When the visitor arrives, the fingerprints are matched against the prints that were approved for the visa.

US-VISIT has been a quiet IT powerhouse since DHS was formed in March 2003. But the department’s inspector general and the Government Accountability Office have criticized DHS for poor management and failing to integrate US-VISIT with other DHS systems.

“US-VISIT is a success, but it also is widely scrutinized,” said Jeremy Grant, senior vice president at the Stanford Group research firm. “The real question is what will the next administration do with it.” The next administration might open bidding for US-VISIT work or send more task orders through the Enterprise Acquisition Gateway for Leading Edge Solutions vehicle, the multibillion-dollar EAGLE contract held by several government contractors, he said.

“It is not clear either way whether US-VISIT will continue to spend at current rates,” said Jeremy Potter, senior analyst at Input Inc., a market research firm in Reston, Va.

Accenture officials were not available for comment.

Biometric boss
With an international fingerprint database larger than the FBI’s, with Japan and the European Union following US-VISIT’s lead, and with a blueprint in the works for further growth, Mocny said, US-VISIT has a bright future as the nation’s biometric engine for border control.

“People are knocking on our door, where once they were critical,” he said. But the program still has hurdles to overcome and little time to do so before the next president’s administration. US-VISIT has met nearly all its big milestones, but instead of winding down, Mocny said he envisions continued expansion. His stature could be growing, too, because he is one of a small number of DHS executives with long tenure at the department.

US-VISIT has churned out plenty of work for Accenture and its team members and will likely continue to do so through the year.

“There has been a lot of money spent on US-VISIT but without enough oversight,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “US-VISIT defines mission creep: It has gotten larger with each wave.”

Under Mocny’s tenure, US-VISIT has accomplished several major goals.

“We have become the DHS biometrics service provider; we share data with DHS branches, state and local,” Mocny said. The system has 33,000 users and 90 million fingerprints, in contrast to the FBI’s 48 million fingerprints.

Busy times ahead
The program is on track to meet its current milestone: conversion to a 10-fingerprint system and better information sharing with the FBI database. By December, 10-fingerprint scanners and readers will be deployed at airports and land ports. Updated systems are now operating at airports in Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, among others. Within weeks, Mocny said, he expects to release the final rule for US-VISIT to begin taking fingerprints from legal residents — so-called green card holders — returning from visits abroad.

Also within weeks, Mocny wants to publish a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for an exit program at U.S. airports. The rule might require airlines to collect fingerprints of departing foreign visitors at check-in, an idea that the airlines oppose because they say it is a government responsibility. Mocny declined to provide details, but he said administration officials hope to address some of the airlines’ concerns in the notice.

Mocny said the budget for the airline program this year is $43 million.

“We need to move the idea forward so we can engage with the airlines,” he said. “We have to use the infrastructure that is available: the checking, the ticketing, the gates, security. My guess is that there is a solution we can develop by the June 2009 time frame to report to Congress.”

Hurdles to clear
By December 2008, Mocny said, he hopes to tackle one of the thorniest challenges of US-VISIT: tracking foreign-visitor exits using biometrics at land ports. An ideal solution would permit visitors to have a finger scanned as they pass through a checkpoint in a vehicle at normal speeds. But the needed technology does not exist yet, he said.

In 2004, the department tested long-range radio frequency identification tags implanted in I-94 documents provided to foreign visitors. The idea was to track the documents’ movements across the border. But the tests did not meet Congress’ requirement to use biometrics to verify identities. What’s more, the RFID verifications had such poor accuracy that DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff publicly called them a failure.

Mocny said the tests nonetheless proved that RFID tags could be effective in capturing information quickly from people in moving vehicles. “Were the results as good as we wanted? No. Was the system ready for prime time? No,” he said.

Nevertheless, Mocny said he is hopeful that industry will come up with better solutions in time to satisfy Congress.

“We don’t have the answer right now,” he added. “We will hold industry days and hope to have an answer soon.”

On the horizon, US-VISIT will work on additional integrations with the FBI’s fingerprint system and its new Next Generation Identification system for collecting photographs, palm prints and possibly iris scans.

DHS officials would like to retool US-VISIT to collect photographs and iris scans, he said, and perhaps acquire facial-recognition technology. “At some point, we’ll test facial recognition and iris recognition,” Mocny said. “Fingerprints are basic. But since we don’t have fingerprints on everyone, there could be a role for facial recognition.”

Mocny anticipates having a strategic plan for US-VISIT by May that outlines a vision for global integration with other exit and entry systems. Japan has adopted a program comparable to US-VISIT, and the European Union is also considering such a system.

“What you will see is a globalization of like-minded systems,” Mocny said, “to keep the bad guys [out] of all our respective countries.”

Alice Lipowicz (alipowicz@1105govinfo.com) is a staff writer at Washington Technology.