Those are pearls that were his eyes: /Nothing of him that doth fade

OK, Readers True, back to the face.

My niece Ana is an engineering student at Carnegie Mellon. The picture you see at the right is an example of work being done there that has the potential to make fine measurements of different parts of the face and face movement from videotapes.

Other attempts have involved maybe a hundred dots on the face that are monitored by software that measures changes.

There are a number of security companies that are hawking products that are intended to allow videotapes of crowds to pick out criminals. These seem to not to have been particularly successful yet, but the technology continues apace.

I was first exposed to the IDENT system for fingerprints about ten years ago when I started representing people accused of illegal entry into the United States. My first reaction was to have my clients refuse to incriminate themselves. How in the world would they ever prove who this guy was and that he was a Mexican national? Well, as a seasoned Assistant US Attorney showed me, they had solved that problem: Automatic Biometric Identification System (IDENT) using automated fingerprint identification systems (AFIS).

Every illegal alien would get each index finger swiped in a machine that recorded it. This then could be compared against a database (actually several databases) of other fingerprints to see if the alien was a recidivist or had a criminal history.

The old INS had been experimenting with this system in 1994 and by the time I was exposed to it in 1998 it was hot stuff.

Decades of success in just lying about your name and age ran head on into this new technology. (Can anyone imagine the plot of Les Miserable today with IDENT? Jean Valjean would never get the chance to reform and Javert would be replaced by a file clerk).

Now I love cool new gadgets and technology. I try to get the latest stuff whether or not I can afford it or figure out how to use it.

But advancing technology certainly changes old ideas about fresh starts and second chances. It also makes possible crimes of previously unimaginable magnitude.

I am still getting my mind around the complicity of New York based IBM in the holocaust. Without specially New York designed machines and punch cards to keep track of and route Polish Jews. They calculated rate of deaths per square kilometer due to progressive starvation and the number of Jews to be transported to the death camps. They kept tabs on trains dispatched to and from Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Says Robert Wolfe, the foremost expert on Nazi documentation and formerly chief of captured German records for the National Archives: ``For those who have complained that the proof is not there, this new evidence gives refutation. The juxtaposition of all these sources -- the new German documents, Justice Department records, the IBM files and eyewitness sources -- all together indicate it was not just trading with the enemy, not just IBM and the Third Reich. This is the proof that IBM enabled the Holocaust. The connection to New York is now proven.'' (Click on the title for the citation).

IBM ENABLED THE HOLOCAUST! My Sweet Lord. Why isn't this big news and shocking to all? Why isn't this part of the culture of understanding corporate evil? Why hasn't this monster been destroyed by Justice (Department of) or at least by justice? Why has not the wrath of an angry God ripped Big Blue asunder?

So my love of the new technology always comes with a queasy feeling. What is the human cost to the IDENT system alone. One anti-immigrant website argues there are more than 366,000 incarcerated illegal immigrants. http://immigrationcounters.com/

That may be high, because the Justice Department numbers look like they are closer to 200,000. In any case, the IDENT system has enabled a new efficiency that allows incarcerating huge numbers who w0uld previously have been sent back, unidentified.

I am no longer able to hear about or meet people incarcerated for immigration offenses without seeing in my minds eye, also, young wives and children who are now left to destitution. (Little Cosette cannot be saved by Jean Valjean because he is in Three Rivers federal prison). I know about them because they call and write and visit me. They wait out in the hall at court. These, Readers True, are real people and it is hard to meet them and not have the flesh crawl every time one the young men they depend upon gets duck-walked away in chains.

Automated Biometric Identification Systems for the face are now here and will soon be highly efficient. For a while, glasses or a new mustache would fool the systems, but now some of the new 3-D systems claim they can make an identification even with a stocking over the face and sun glasses.

The data bases for Illegal Entries have been collecting photographs from the beginning. But this is a sea change. Soon it will be possible to take photographs of crowds and identify everyone.

It will also be possible to sort these based on age, gender and race, prior criminal history, income level, house value, employment history, disease history, book purchases, credit card expenditures.

It will be possible to correlate the face with automobile ownership and travel history as recorded in GPS systems. And cell phone use as shown by tower locations and with searches of key words used in the conversations. And e-mail communications based on key words used and internet search history.

Also, check another dimension noted by Mr. Kurgan in his blog for today: http://andyoubrutus.blogspot.com/

If the FACS develops to its full promise, it will be possible to pick out who is worried or frightened or angry. And all this from a videotape of everyone at a football game or a protest march.

Just think what the Nazis could have done with this neat technology.