Original story
International Customs Digest 8.1.2007
Customs seize more illegal personal identifiers in Heathrow swoop
British customs and excise officers have again intercepted a consignment of digital cameras equipped with outlawed personal identifiers. The cameras were found, apparently after a tip-off, in a container at London’s Heathrow Terminal Five.
The cameras were fitted with photo-ID archives that covered all Greek passport holders. The material for the digital archives was almost certainly taken from the database stolen last year from the datafiles of the Passport Unit of the Greek Department of the Interior, located in Athens. The special feature of the cameras is that they are capable of recognizing the person shown in the viewfinder and can then search out background information on this individual from the data networks.
Recognition technology of this type was originally developed for the needs of private security firms. Cameras were programmed with full-face photographs of the client company’s staff and customers, and these were linked to pass systems on the company’s premises in order to replace staff passcards and keys. Since that time, however, memory capacity has increased several hundred times over, and now it is possible for a largish pocket-sized camera to store images of several million people.
This kind of photo gallery is, however, totally illegal, as it clearly represents a register of individuals for the collection, storage, and maintenance of which the necessary permits must be sought under the UN Edict on Privacy Protection Rights. This was obviously not the case in this instance, and to make matters worse, the photo archives were also stolen property.
The computer break-in in Athens was certainly not the first of its kind, or the only example. In recent years there have been burglaries and attempted burglaries on databases in several EU countries that conform to the same systems standards as used by the Greek Passport Unit. Finnish police officials, for example, had a nasty scare when it was thought that organized crime rings from Southern Europe had stolen the passport photos of the entire female population of the country, but the break-in was traced to a group of students at the Helsinki University of Technology.
The fifty cameras seized at Heathrow were apparently assembled in England, where the photo archives were also installed. The pattern recognition technology and the photo memory was produced at the Intel plants in the United States, and the camera optics, with their hidden optical fibre rods, are made by Canon. According to the customs declaration, the cameras were bound for a Tallinn-based company specializing in burglar alarms and real estate protection systems. A representative of the company said that they were quite unaware of the photo archives contained in the equipment, and that they intended to install their own already-prepared photo archives in the cameras for sale to waiting industrial and household customers in Estonia.
British customs investigators were reluctant to release details of their ongoing enquiries into the case, but hinted that the person picking up the container in Tallinn would hardly have been planning to deliver the cameras to the company concerned. Interpol has reported that similar camera systems have been used elsewhere in Europe, for example to recognize immigrants who have entered a country illegally, in order to extort money from them in return for silence.
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