The US political leadership plans to spend a significant budget on biometrics to secure its borders in coming years, according to US officials.Technology such as biometrics featured heavily in the DHS Industry Day organised by the newspaper Washington Technology this week.”Congress wants us to spend a billion dollars over the next few years on biometrics”, Mark Borkowski, assistant commissioner of the Customs and Border Protection's Office of Technology Innovation and Acquisition, told the publication.”We are in the process of designing the program to figure out what to ask for, so you will be seeing an attempt through things like RFIs and other mechanisms to ask you what you have available”.Other officials said at the even that for such programmes to succeed, that there was a need for better internal communications at DHS and the need to tie IT and procurement closer to DHS' mission.In January this year in response to questioning, DHS officials stressed that the department's agencies have made significant progress with the entry and exit system in the past decade, including progress with studying biometric approaches.”DHS has concluded that a viable biometric exit solution depends on leveraging emerging technologies to innovate ways of processing passengers biometrically,” they said. “In coming to this conclusion, DHS has considered and rejected broad options involving recapitalizing the infrastructure at land borders and airports or the hiring [of] additional officers to manually verify all departing travelers.”

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