UK police spending $75 million on mobile biometrics
22 August, 2008
category: Biometrics, Government
The UK government’s Home Office is set to spend up to $75 million on a program called Midas, which will provide police agencies with mobile biometric kits intended to enable officers to identify people based on their fingerprints in real time, according to a Computer Weekly article. The Home Office is looking to sign a number of vendors to supply systems for the program.
A previous system, called Project Lantern, has 200 units in use at 20 police departments in the UK. The Project Lantern devices worked very similar to the ones planned for in Midas, requiring roughly two to three minutes to return information on a scanned image.
National deployment of Project Lantern was estimated to to be around 2010. Most officers who were involved in the project support the idea of mobile fingerprint readers as they reported the devices saved roughly 30 minutes in a given incident.
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