How L-1 Identity Solutions Came To Be

(Imagen 4. Not an exaggeration.)

The history of L-1 Identity Solutions has always fascinated me. I dealt with then-bitter enemies Digital Biometrics and Identix while I was at Printrak, with Viisage while I was at Motorola, and de facto competed with MorphoTrust while I was at MorphoTrak…until MorphoTrust in effect acquired MorphoTrak when IDEMIA NSS was set up and I reported to a supervisor in Massachusetts.

I used to have a PowerPoint presentation that traced the family tree of all of L-1’s acquisitions. Wish I still had it. But here’s a little taste of where things stood before Joseph Atick and Robert LaPenta started combining things:

• Identix, while making some efforts in the AFIS market, concentrated on creating live scan fingerprinting machines, where it competed (sometimes in court) against companies such as Digital Biometrics and Bioscrypt.
• The fingerprint companies started to compete against facial recognition companies, including Viisage and Visionics. 
• Oh, and there were also iris companies such as Iridian. 
• And there were other ways to identify people. Even before 9/11 mandated REAL ID (which we may get any year now), Polaroid was making great efforts to improve driver’s licenses to serve as a reliable form of identification.

(Some former links are dead and were removed from the bullets above. But the Digital Biometrics-Identix court case is described here, and Polaroid’s history with driver’s licenses in Utah is described here.)

Back in 2023 I assembled a list of “Five Topics a Biometric Content Marketing Expert Needs to Understand.” My fifth topic was “How L-1 Identity Solutions came to be.” I claimed I was half joking, but in reality I was completely serious. Despite similar efforts by HID and others (including IDEMIA), the sheer number of companies that combined to form L-1 remains unmatched.

Five Topics a Biometric Content Marketing Expert Needs to Understand