Did Disney World’s biometrics program identify a suspected murderer in its park?

Posted on August 28, 2013 by Joe from MassPrivateI

MassPrivatel
Florida - The man suspected of shooting and killing a Manchester man at a downtown nightclub this month was arrested while on a Disney vacation in Florida, police said. 
Mike Cruz, 23, whose last known address was in East Hartford, was seen poolside in Orlando, Fla. Friday and later taken into custody by U.S. federal marshals and members of a fugitive task force. The task force works with the Hartford police Major Crimes Division.  
He is being held in Florida with bail set at $2 million on a charge of fugitive from justice and is awaiting extradition to Connecticut, Lt. Brian Foley said in a press release. When Cruz arrives, he will be arrested on a warrant charging him with murder, first-degree reckless endangerment and criminal possession of a pistol/revolver, police said.
On Aug. 4, a disturbance began inside Up Or On The Rocks, 50 Union Place. The fight continued outside after the club closed.
Brian Simpe of Manchester was shot and killed during the altercation, police said.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/crime/hc-hartford-murder-arrest-0827-20130827,0,547235.story

Admittedly this story doesn’t come out and say Disney World used its biometrics program to identify a patron and notify authorities, that would open them up to a huge lawsuit. 
The following examples show how closely Disney World works with Big Brother, I’ll let the reader decide.

Walt Disney World is using a biometric RFID gate system:

Walt Disney World is in the midst of introducing a new gate system at the park which uses cards with RFID chips and fingerprint biometrics.
According to a report in the Examiner, the theme park was previously using this RFID technology, but it was only available to those staying at the park.
In the 1990s, the park introduced fingerprint geometry scanners to verify ticket holders, though they have since been upgraded with fingerprint scanners.
In a 2006 Associated Press report from The Boston Globe, at the time the fingerprint scanners were first introduced, a spokesperson for the theme park said that scanned information is stored separately and that after 30 days, or a fully-utilized ticket, unique data is purged from the system.
A spokesperson at Walt Disney World has confirmed to BiometricUpdate.com that the new system is being put in place, and will replace the existing turnstile system and the paper passes previously used by passholders.
Under the new system, passholders can exchange their paper ticket for a new plastic card with an RFID chip inside.
The chip is intended to make entering the park or boarding rides a simpler process, and this new card will also contain passholders’ biometric data, pre-registered in the system.  When reaching a gate, passholders tap their card and then place their finger on the scanner to verify identity.
The spokesperson from Walt Disney World was also adamant to say that fingerprints are not stored in the database, rather a unique numerical sequence derived from passholders’ original fingerprint scan is stored and used for verification.
This morning, Jason Hodge, VP at Securlinx, posted his thoughts on the purpose of the system and believes it has to do with pass-sharing and the bottom line.
“It’s my impression that Disney does this mostly for the purposes of making sure that discounted longer-term passes aren’t shared among different individuals. It’s not hard, however, envisioning that this might point the way toward future security applications.”
A recent Biometric Research Note suggests that fingerprint technology is the most established and widespread form of biometrics, and will dominate the residential and commercial security product marketplace. The Biometric Research Group projects that fingerprint technology will represent US$3 billion of revenue within the residential and commercial security product marketplace by 2017.
http://www.biometricupdate.com/201303/walt-disney-world-introduces-biometric-verification-for-passholders 

Disney biometrics and the Department of Defense:

The Department of Defense (DOD) has been interested in Disney Amusement Parks for decades. Known as Operation Mickey Mouse, the DOD has been studying Disney’s use of technology and coercion techniques. The DOD has also been working in conjunction with Disney to collect information on Beta testing operations that the popular theme park uses on their customers. Best of all, who would ever suspect Disney of being a front for the US government?
Through the Freedom of Information Act, the Disney Corporation hands over to the DOD all data on their customers. The DOD has an overabundance of information on the general public going back decades thanks to their relationship with Disney. After the DOD analyses and profiles their data from Disney, it is ready to be used to the US government for whatever purposes they deem fit.
Within the Disney walls and on their cruise ships, a separate digital monetary system is used.
Customers trade their paper money for a digital card or voucher to purchases goods and services. On the cruise ship alone, the value of the digital Mickey money is determined prior to boarding. The card can be used at the ship, as well as at designated ports of call where the ship docks. As a programming technique, this digital money as replacing paper dollars conditions customers to think this idea is superior to carrying cash. This is reminiscent of the push of debit cards by banks in the 90’s.
The small cities Disney has created through their compound, although seemingly harmless, can harness quite a bit of private information on unsuspecting customers. All movements of patrons are tracked and traced through a myriad of cameras strategically placed throughout the theme parks.
Facial recognition technology is a part of Disney’s new cruise liners. Moving Art lines the walls of the ship to entertain the passengers. This pictures move in response to the passenger’s facial movements, ensuring that the same sequence will not play twice. Although this may entertain, the passenger’s facial movements are being recorded by the computers within the pictures at all times.
Disney’s private island, Castaway Cay, uses an array of photographs taken of the passengers, with or without their permission or prior knowledge. When a passenger wants to purchase one of these photographs, they use an encoded voucher (digital Mickey money). The facial recognition software works much like Facebook’s new photo tag application. Then the passenger can choose to have an album created through the use of this technology. Photos, regardless of whether or not they are sold to passengers, are entered into a data base for future use. Because the photographs are legally property of Disney, they can be used at the corporation’s discretion.
http://www.occupycorporatism.com/disney-biometrics-and-the-department-of-defense/  
Disney theme parks became the first to use biometrics at their ticket entrances.
According to Janel Pisorchik, Director of Business Operations at Accesso (a Florida based electronic ticketing and eCommerce solutions company):
Disney was the first theme park to introduce Biometrics to the entrance process. The initial type of technology used was hand geometry. This was an effective deterrent to help decrease the number of tickets from being resold. However, from an operational perspective, explaining the enrollment & verification process to the guests entering the parks was a little challenging.
Walt Disney World, bills itself as one of the happiest and most magical places anywhere, also may be one of the most closely watched and secure. The most popular tourist attraction in the United States is beginning to scan visitors’ fingerprint information.
For years, Disney has recorded onto tickets the geometry and shape of visitors’ fingers to prevent ticket fraud or resale, as an alternative to time-consuming photo identification checks.
All of the geometry readers at Disney’s four Orlando theme parks will be replaced with machines that scan fingerprint information, according to industry experts familiar with the technology. The four parks attract tens of millions of visitors each year.
“It’s essentially a technology upgrade,” said Kim Prunty, spokeswoman for Walt Disney World. The new scanner, like the old finger geometry scanner, “takes an image, identifies a series of points, measures the distance between those points, and turns it into a numerical value.”
She added, “To call it a fingerprint is a little bit of a stretch.”
“The lack of transparency has always been a problem,” said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. She said Disney’s use of the technology “fails a proportionality test” by requiring too much personal information for access to roller coasters.
“What they’re doing is taking a technology that was used to control access to high-level security venues and they’re applying it to controlling access to a theme park,” Coney said.
George Crossley, president of the Central Florida ACLU, said, “It’s impossible for them to convince me that all they are getting is the fact that that person is the ticket-holder.” 
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2006/09/05/tech-disney.html
http://newsinitiative.org/story/2006/08/14/walt_disney_world_the_governments 
http://boingboing.net/2008/03/15/fingertip-biometrics.html 
What’s on the horizon you ask? How about Iris recogniton:

For decades, researchers seeking biometric identifiers other than fingerprints believed that irises were a strong biometric because their one-of-a-kind texture meets the stability and uniqueness requirements for biometrics. Recent research, for example, has questioned that belief, finding that the recognition of the subjects’ irises became increasingly difficult, consistent with an aging effect. Other researchers, however, found no evidence of a widespread aging effect. A computer model used to study large populations estimates that iris recognition of average people will typically be useable for decades after the initial enrollment.
A new report by biometric researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology(NIST) uses data from thousands of frequent travelers enrolled in an iris recognition program to determine that no consistent change occurs in the distinguishing texture of their irises for at least a decade. 
These findings inform identity program administrators on how often iris images need to be recaptured to maintain accuracy.
A NIST release reports that for decades, researchers seeking biometric identifiers other than fingerprints believed that irises were a strong biometric because their one-of-a-kind texture meets the stability and uniqueness requirements for biometrics. Recent research, however, has questioned that belief. A study by S. Fenker and K. W. Bowyer of 217 subjects over a 3-year period found that the recognition of the subjects’ irises became increasingly difficult, consistent with an aging effect.
To learn more, NIST biometric researchers used several methods to evaluate iris stability.
Researchers first examined anonymous data from millions of transactions from NEXUS, a joint Canadian and American program used by frequent travelers to move quickly across the Canadian border. As part of NEXUS, members’ irises are enrolled into the system with an iris camera and their irises are scanned and matched to system files when they travel across the border. NIST researchers also examined a larger, but less well-controlled set of anonymous statistics collected over a six-year period.
In both large-population studies, NIST researchers found no evidence of a widespread aging effect, said Biometric Testing Project Leader Patrick Grother. A NIST computer model estimates that iris recognition of average people will typically be useable for decades after the initial enrollment.
“In our iris aging study we used a mixed effects regression model, for its ability to capture population-wide aging and individual-specific aging, and to estimate the aging rate over decades,” said Grother. “We hope these methods will be applicable to other biometric aging studies such as face aging because of their ability to represent variation across individuals who appear in a biometric system irregularly.”
NIST researchers then reanalyzed the images from the earlier studies of 217 subjects that evaluated the population-wide aspect. Those studies reported an increase in false rejection rates over time — that is, the original, enrolled images taken in the first year of the study did not match those taken later. While the rejection numbers were high, the results did not necessarily demonstrate that the iris texture itself was changing.
A study by M. Fairhurst and M. Erbilek identified pupil dilation as the primary cause behind the false rejection rates. This prompted the NIST team to consider the issue. NIST researchers showed that dilation in the original pool of subjects increased in the second year of the test and decreased the next, but was not able to determine why. When they accounted for the dilation effect, researchers did not observe a change in the texture or aging effect. Some iris cameras normalize dilation by using shielding or by varying the illumination.
The release notes that NIST established the Iris Exchange (IREX) program in 2008 to give quantitative support to iris recognition standardization, development and deployment. Sponsors for this research include the Criminal Justice Information Systems Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of Biometric Identity Management in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and theDHS Science and Technology Directorate.
http://www.nist.gov/manuscript-publication-search.cfm?pub_id=913900
http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2013/08/did-disney-worlds-biometrics-program.html