Redstate

Posted at 10:08am on Aug. 13, 2007 'HIIDE' and Seek

Protecting the People by Building the Database

By Jeff Emanuel

SALMAN PAK, IRAQ – Despite its many negatives, one benefit to the military of a lengthy, fluid war is the advances and improvements in battlefield equipment and technology which are fielded to meet its rapidly changing combat and security needs. Though the words of a certain former Secretary of Defense – “You go to war with the Army you have” – still do (and always will) hold true, the technological arsenal deployed by the US military in its quest not only to keep its soldiers safe, but also to combat terror and to establish the peace in the current long war, is ever-growing, with more useful assets being deployed with the soldiers all the time.

One such technological asset now being used in Iraq is the HIIDE™ (Hand-held Interagency Identity Detection Equipment) system, a biometric identification database through which soldiers can quickly input and access the name, age, address, religious sect, birthplace, fingerprints, retinal information, and facial photograph of any individual who has been previously entered into the system and uploaded to the database’s mainframe.

The system is important enough to the overall mission in Iraq that General William Casey, the Army’s Chief of Staff, has been checking in with battlefield commanders on his current tour through Iraq, inquiring about the availability and the functionality of the new handheld biometric devices.

“The world’s first hand-held, multi-modal (Iris, Finger, Face) enrollment and recognition device,” according to the company’s (SecuriMetrics, Inc.) website, “the HIIDE™ was developed for the US Department of Defense and other government agencies.” Last August, the DoD signed a $10 million contract with SecuriMetrics, and the HIIDE system is now being used with increasing frequency – and success – in Iraq.

Read on . . .

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