US trusted-traveller programme takes off

The slow-developing programme to give expedited passage at airport security to trusted travellers who pay a fee, is finally gaining traction, according to USA Today.

More than five years after it was proposed following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, trusted-traveller programmes are operating at six airports. "We're pleased there are some competitors anticipated in the marketplace," says Bill Connors, executive director of the National Business Travel Association, which supports the programme.

The Registered Traveller programme allows certain airline passengers, for an annual membership fee, to quickly go through a separate airport security lane. Customers must pass a government background check and submit biometric information, such as fingerprints or an iris scan to be read by an electronic device at the gate.

The increasing use of biometric identification in the workplace has led to a number of concerns regarding the extent to which employers are permitted to collect and use unique characteristics of employees, says Mondaq.com.

It also says concerns about the balancing of employee rights with employers' legitimate business interests have arisen.

A number of adjudicators have considered the issue in the context of privacy rights. More recently, the issues have expanded to the human rights context, in particular, an employer's duty to accommodate employees where the use of the technology may conflict with religious beliefs.

Wal-Mart's CIO, Rollin Ford says: "What's good for the planet is good for business," reports RFID Journal. He says RFID can potentially improve the environmental health of the world and the financial health of the retail giant and its suppliers.

At a recent keynote address at RFID Journal LIVE! 2007, Ford reiterated Wal-Mart's goal to deploy RFID at another 400 of its stores this year, in addition to the 1 000 already using the technology to track cases and pallets of goods.

In addition, Ford said, Wal-Mart intends to use the technology to help increase all its stores' efficiency by 20% within seven years. "We're not backing off or slowing down," he asserted.

Checkpoint Systems is rolling out a line of radio frequency identification (RFID) enabled labels for supporting advanced inventory control, and for potentially helping to nab shoplifters, according to PCWorld.

The technology, however, is already alarming consumer privacy advocates, who fear such a combination could permit the surreptitious tracking of customers who carry away the RFID chips in their purchases. The company unveiled the label, called Evolve, yesterday.

Checkpoint said the Evolve label carries an industry standard Generation 2 RFID tag for tracking, and a separate radio frequency circuit to enable in-store electronic article surveillance. The inventory tracking software in the Evolve RFID chip can be used to manage stock levels and to monitor inventory at the case and individual item levels.

Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 is one of those grand, unfunded federal mandates that is a great idea, but nearly impossible to pull off to its fullest extent, according to CRN.com.

The order calls for all federal agencies to adopt a single ID standard for controlling physical and logical access across the entire federal government by 2008. The IDs must be tamper-resistant and difficult to duplicate, meaning that terrorists and hostile operatives can't compromise the government's infrastructure.

"Making that happen in a single agency's one facility is exceedingly challenging and expensive," says Lawrence M Walsh, editor of VARBusiness and GovernmentVAR. "Making it work across the entire federal government is next to impossible. While we've had smart cards, digital certificates and encryption for years, no one has truly unlocked the promise of public key infrastructure that would make such digital credential verification possible."