TRI In The News

Our Faces and the DMV

September 26, 2011

9/26/2011

TRI IN THE NEWS: OUR FACES AND THE DMV

From The Democrat Herald

When the DMV takes your photo for a new driver's license, your face gets compared with hundreds of thousands of other faces in the agency's database.
The DMV wants to see if you are cheating on your identity, and now and then they spot someone trying to pass as someone else.

I didn't know about this until I talked this week with David House, the well informed and always extremely helpful media spokesman at the DMV in Salem.

I called him after the paper got a press release about a license controversy in Oklahoma. The handout came from the Rutherford Institute, a private organization that often goes to bat on behalf of citizens to protect their civil rights and religious freedom.

In Oklahoma, the institute reports: "In March 2011, Kaye Beach applied to renew her driver's license with the Department of Public Safety. Upon learning that the biometric photographs used by DPS are stored in a database that is managed and accessed by international organizations, Beach repeatedly voiced her religious objection to the practice and asked to be allowed to use a low-resolution photograph for her license. Kaye Beach subscribes to the Christian belief, detailed in the Bible's Book of Revelation, that Christians must not participate in a global numbering identification system."

I asked what they meant by a "biometric" photo. It's simply a digital photo that is stored in a database, "of sufficiently high resolution that a computer program can read the facial proportions from the print and compare it with the stored digital photo," explained Benjamin Mayo of the Rutherford Institute.

I don't know that there's anything in the Bible against any "global identification system," but even without the Bible it sounds like something worth resisting.

I asked House whether Oregon does anything similar, or the same.
Not exactly. Since the 1990s, though, our driver's license photos have been taken with a digital camera and then stored in the DMV database.

When someone comes in for a new license and has a photo taken, the software in the system goes to work. Overnight it compares all the photos taken that day to all the photos already stored.

If the names don't match on two seemingly identical faces, the system will flag them. House says this happens "a few dozen times a month."

DMV then goes to work and contacts the people involved to check. Sometimes there's a good explanation, such as identical twins. And sometimes one of the parties is an identify thief.

Sometimes, too, this happens: A teenager gets a fake ID with the personal information of an older sibling but uses his own photo. Later he tries to get a license under his own name and bingo, the long-ago fraud pops up.

What about some sinister global aspect?

Not in Oregon. State law strictly limits the use of DMV license photos to only this: checking new licenses photos against all others, and only at the time of licensing.

If the FBI comes around and wants to check a photo, House says, the answer is always no.