Access Control | Identification

The Transportation Security Administration is set to deal with tens of thousands more passengers travelling through Indianapolis International Airport before and after Super Bowl XLVI with additional screening lanes.

As their boss touted this year’s Super Bowl as one of the most secure in history, U.S. customs agents were busy extending protections beyond the physical venue and into intellectual property on the Web, seizing Websites selling fake National Football League gear and busting apparel and souvenir counterfeiters.

DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano announced on Feb. 1 a partnership with the NFL to expand the agency’s “If you see something, say something” public awareness campaign.

The Ralph Carr Judicial Center in Denver, CO, which is on track for completion in the Spring of 2013, has selected AMAG Technology’s Symmetry Homeland V7 Security Management System.

On Jan. 31, the Idaho Kootenai tribe’s identification document officially became a valid form of identification to enter the U.S.

The tribe, whose lands straddle the U.S./Canadian border in Idaho, was the first Native American tribe to sign a memorandum of agreement with U.S. Customs and Border Protection in 2009 to begin the process of creating a secure travel document denoting identity, tribal membership and citizenship. Production of the cards began in May 2011, said CBP.

A privacy rights group told the Federal Trade Commission that the FTC should suspend facial recognition technology’s deployment by commercial users until privacy and other safeguard standards are developed.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, in comments to the FTC on Feb. 1, recommended the delayed deployment because it said facial recognition technologies can be used by strangers to determine a person's actual identity. The group said that “poses a risk to privacy and personal security.”

In the coming months, the Department of Homeland Security hopes to reform some administrative practices to ease the visa process for highly-skilled immigrants who want to enter, or remain in, the U.S. for work.

A group of U.S. Senators asked DHS to reconcile its approach to immigration enforcement in light of Cook County, Illinois’ refusal to enforce federal detention requests there.

The Department of Homeland Security has focused not only on domestic security in the last year, but also on becoming an international force in securing trade, and it will push those efforts forward in 2012, said Secretary of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano in her second “State of America’s Homeland Security” address