UK Borders Bill
1:30 pm
Professor Ross Anderson: I tend to the view that an iris recognition system could be implemented in a more lightweight way, almost out of the box. The reason for that is that they are working the system in the United Arab Emirates, where their principal concern is to stop people who have been deported, principally Pakistani prostitutes, from re-entering the country under passports in different names, which they get by bribing officials. Over the past few years, the United Arab Emirates has scanned millions of people who have arrived in the country and it has caught thousands of people trying to re-enter the country illegally. A system like that can be stand-alone; you do not have to spend years and billions of pounds integrating it with existing technology. The possibility exists of carrying out that kind of entry screening independently of any future fingerprint strategy.