Travelers wait to be fingerprinted and photographed at the San Francisco airport last week.
		By Marcio Jose Sanchez, AP

The readers are being used to capture foreign travelers' fingerprints so they can be checked against a government database of terrorism suspects and criminals.

The airport installations represent a breakthrough for biometrics, which is a way of positively identifying people from their unique characteristics, such as fingerprints and retinas. "It's the highest-profile biometric implementation to date," says Maureen Stevens, a Cross Match vice president. "It's basically making biometrics mainstream."

Federal officials say they think the use of biometrics could set world standards. The new program "will serve as a catalyst in the growing international use of biometrics to expedite processing of travelers," says Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge.

An estimated 24 million foreign visitors to the USA a year will be fingerprinted, Homeland Security officials say. Travelers from 27 countries who don't need visas to enter the USA for short trips are exempt from the fingerprint checks.

The Cross Match reader, which costs about $400, records the images of two fingers and produces a match in less than a minute.

The government's demand for fingerprint readers has been a big lift for Cross Match, which started with three employees in 1996.

The Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., company joined a handful of others in developing technology that permits fingerprints to be captured electronically at a time when the FBI was switching its databases away from the traditional paper and ink systems. The new system has dramatically cut the time it takes law enforcement to receive answers on detailed background checks and suspect inquiries. It used to take as long as a week. Now it's a day or less.

As result, Cross Match has grown quickly. Inc. magazine listed it as the fifth-fastest-growing privately owned company in 2002. Its revenue that year was $24.5 million, up 11,517% in five years. The firm is not releasing 2003 revenue.

Sales increased as the company improved its product. Early models were the size of refrigerators. Today's most sophisticated portable model, which weighs 23 pounds and can capture prints from all 10 fingers instead of just two, is used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's being used to fingerprint prisoners and suspected terrorists, says Robert Bucknam, a senior vice president of Cross Match.

Cross Match's machines are also used by immigration authorities outside the USA. The Singapore government is using an earlier version of Cross Match's new airport machine to fingerprint border crossers from Malaysia.

The terrorism threat is boosting not only Cross Match, but the entire biometrics industry.

"It's immensely important," says Jay Meier, senior technology analyst for Miller Johnson Steichen Kinnard, a brokerage based in Minneapolis. Biometrics "has been talked about as a potential monster industry for a couple of decades, but without that sense of urgency there was no catalyst to invest in that technology."

Electronic fingerprinting has been gaining in popularity with the military, law enforcement and the banking industry. A few states electronically fingerprint driver's license applicants. Having the systems in airports is one of the most visible installations yet.

"It's not going to make the industry rich, but it shows we're seeing early signs of mass adoption by government entities," says Joel Fishbein Jr., technology analyst for Janney Montgomery Scott. "This is the tip of the iceberg in terms of biometric adoption."

While the war on terrorism has been garnering all the attention, "The big news is going to be as this moves into the commercial world," says Ted Johnson, Cross Match's CEO. Banks and other financial institutions are using electronic fingerprinting for background checks of employees.

Other companies are also making digital fingerprinting equipment. Fishbein says the other major domestic provider is Minneapolis-based Identix.

Identix says it's working with Homeland Security on later phases of the airport project, which will include the ability to digitally match photographs.

Despite the privacy implications of fingerprinting travelers, experts say they think visitors won't find the new process too intrusive.

"I think it's going to be more reassuring" to visitors to know the U.S. is trying to make itself more secure, says Noel Irwin Hentschel, CEO of AmericanTours International, which hosts more than 1 million tourists to the USA a year.

"I don't think it will change visitation to the United States one iota," says John Marks, president of the San Francisco Convention & Visitor Bureau. "If they (handle the procedure) in a friendly manner, an expeditious manner, I don't think it will be an issue."