Woodward Featured in CAS Magazine on Biometrics
John D. Woodward, Jr., Professor of the Practice of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, was recently interviewed on how biometrics could safeguard our security and why identifying people by physical characteristics like fingerprints should replace our current identification systems.
Woodward was interviewed for an article in Boston University’s CAS Magazine entitled “The ID Dilemma.”
From the text of the article:
Would you submit your fingerprints to a database? Don’t dismiss the idea too quickly, says John Woodward, a 21-year veteran of the CIA and Defense Department who specializes in intelligence, counterterrorism, and technology policy. Now a professor of the practice of international relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School for Global Studies, Woodward talked with arts&sciences about how our biometrics could safeguard our security.
Why do you think identifying people by physical characteristics like fingerprints should replace our current ID system?
What is the most commonly requested ID when you go about your daily duties? Your driver’s license. The original purpose of the driver’s license is so you can drive a vehicle legally, but that use has been overshadowed by other demands. You produce your license to buy alcohol, board an airplane, cash a check. We have basically outsourced identity management to each state’s department of motor vehicles. As long as we have a system that relies on a document to establish our identity, we’re going to run the risk of being fooled by someone using an alias. We would be more secure if we standardized identity credentialing to federal and state organizations that would have that as their exclusive mission. It would probably upset quite a few people if the government created identity management bureaus that took mug shots and fingerprints before issuing identity credentials. But it’s not madness to think about a system like that. The US Department of Defense already uses such a system.
You can read the entire article here.
Woodward is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. During his twenty-year CIA career, he served as an operations officer in the Clandestine Service and as a technical intelligence officer in the Directorate of Science and Technology, with assignments in Washington, DC, East Asia, Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. Learn more about him here.