When keeping your websites updated, I advise you to do as I say, not as I do. Two of my websites were significantly out of date and needed hurried corrections.
I realized this morning that the “My Experience” page on my jebredcal website was roughly a year out of date, so I hurriedly added content to it. Now the page will turn up in searches for the acronym “ABM” (OK, maybe not on the first page of the search results).
A little over a year ago, Bredemarket announced two changes in my business scope and business hours. I stopped accepting work from clients who marketed systems to identify individuals, and I reduced my business hours to Saturday mornings only.
Generated at craiyon.com.
I had to change my business scope and business hours. On May 9, 2022, I started a full-time position with a company in the identity industry, which meant that I couldn’t consult on weekdays and couldn’t consult on identity projects.
But things change.
As of May 31, 2023, I will no longer be employed at my day job.
Which is my misfortune…um…opportunity.
Generated at craiyon.com.
Has Bredemarket changed its business scope and business hours a second time?
Yes.
As of June 1, 2023:
If you need a consultant for marketing or proposal work, and your company is involved in the identification of individuals, Bredemarket can accept the work.
If you need a consultant who can meet with you during normal business hours, Bredemarket can accept the work.
So what?
My…um…opportunity is your opportunity.
Now that I can expand my business scope and business hours again, you can take advantage of my extensive marketing expertise, including deep experience in the identity industry.
This means you can obtain quickly-generated and expert content with an agreed-upon focus.
This means you can get content that increases your revenue.
These two e-books explain (a) how Bredemarket starts a project with you, and (b) how Bredemarket has helped other businesses over the years.
(UPDATE OCTOBER 22, 2023: “SIX QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU IS SO 2022. DOWNLOAD THE NEWER “SEVEN QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU” HERE.)
I recently announced a change in business scope for my DBA Bredemarket. Specifically, Bredemarket will no longer accept client work for solutions that identify individuals using (a) friction ridges (including fingerprints and palm prints) and/or (b) faces.
This impacts some companies that previously did business with me, and can potentially impact other companies that want to do business with me. If you are one of these companies, I am no longer available.
Since Bredemarket will no longer help you with your friction ridge/face marketing and writing needs, who will? Who has the expertise to help you? I have two suggestions.
Tandem Technical Writing
Do you need someon who is not only an excellent communicator, but also knows the ins and outs of AFIS and ABIS systems? Turn to Tandem Technical Writing LLC.
I first met Laurel Jew back in 1995 when I started consulting with, and then working for, Printrak. In fact, I joined Printrak when Laurel went on maternity leave. (I was one of two people who joined Printrak at that time. As I’ve previously noted, Laurel needed two people to replace her.)
Laurel worked for Printrak and its predecessor De La Rue Printrak for several years in its proposals organization.
Today, her biometric and communication experience is available to you. Tandem Technical Writing provides its clients with “15 years of proposal writing and biometrics technology background with high win %.”
Why does this matter to you? Because Laurel not only understands your biometric business, but also understands how to communicate to your biometric clients. Not many people can do both, so Laurel is a rarity in this industry.
Perhaps your needs are more technical. Maybe you need someone who is a certified forensics professional, and who has also implemented many biometric systems. If that is your need, then you will want to consider Applied Forensic Services LLC.
I met Mike French in 2009 when Safran acquired Motorola’s biometric business and merged it into its U.S. subsidiary Sagem Morpho, creating MorphoTrak (“Morpho” + “Printrak”). I worked with him at MorphoTrak and IDEMIA until 2020.
Unlike me, Mike is a true forensic professional. (See his LinkedIn profile.) Back in 1994, when I was still learning to spell AFIS, Mike joined the latent print unit at the King County (Washington) Sheriff’s Office, where he spent over a decade before joining Sagem Morpho. He is an IAI-certified Latent Print Examiner, an IEEE-certified Biometric Professional, and an active participant in IAI and other forensic activities. I’ve previously referenced his advice on why agencies should conduct their own AFIS benchmarks.
Why does this matter to you? Because Mike’s consultancy, Applied Forensic Services, can provide expert advice on biometric procurements and implementation, ensuring that you get the biometric system that addresses your needs.
There are other companies that can help you with friction ridge and face marketing, writing, and consultation services.
I specifically mention these two because I have worked with their principals both as an employee during my Printrak-to-IDEMIA years, and as a sole proprietor during my Bredemarket years. Laurel and Mike are both knowledgeable, dedicated, and can add value to your firm or agency.
And, unlike some experienced friction ridge and face experts, Laurel and Mike are still working and have not retired. (“Where have you gone, Peter Higgins…”)
Bredemarket does not accept client work for solutions that identify individuals using (a) friction ridges (including fingerprints and palm prints) and/or (b) faces.
Bredemarket does not accept client work for solutions that identify individuals using secure documents, such as driver’s licenses or passports.
(Welcome to my A/B test. For the other version of this post, click here.)
As I’ve previously noted, the 2009 NAS report on forensic science has revolutionized fingerprint identification and a number of other forensic disciplines.
One part of this revolution was the Department of Justice 2018 document entitled “UNIFORM LANGUAGE FOR TESTIMONY AND REPORTS FOR THE FORENSIC LATENT PRINT DISCIPLINE.” A PDF version of the report can be found here.
This document applies to Department of Justice examiners who are authorized to prepare reports and provide expert witness testimony regarding the forensic examination of latent print evidence.
Based upon the NAS report and subsequent efforts, Part IV of the DOJ document (“Qualifications and Limitations of Forensic Latent Print Examinations”) sets some clear guidelines about how a latent print examiner should describe his or her findings.
So a pre-2009 latent print examiner who appeared in court and said “I am 100% certain that these two fingerprints belong to the same person, to the exclusion of all other persons, because I have never been wrong in the last 25 years” would fail the 2018 DOJ criteria.
But would a jury know that?
That’s what CSAFE discussed in a recent post, “AAFS 2022 RECAP: UNDERSTANDING JUROR COMPREHENSION OF FORENSIC TESTIMONY: ASSESSING JURORS’ DECISION MAKING AND EVIDENCE EVALUATION.” Feel free to read the entire article, or if you like you can read my “succinct” excerpt from two portions of the article:
Koolmees and her colleagues examined whether jurors could distinguish low-quality testimony from high-quality testimony of forensic experts, using the language guidelines released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2018 as an indicator of quality….
Only when comparing the conditions of zero guideline violations and four and five violations were there any changes in guilty verdicts, signifying jurors may notice a change in the quality of forensic testimony only when the quality is severely low.
So this raises the question of whether the NAS report, for all of its revolutionary effects, will have any true results in courtroom testimony.
Will jurors heed the advice from the DOJ guidelines to accurately consider the testimony of a forensic expert?
Or will the jurors’ “common sense,” based on old Perry Mason and C.S.I. TV shows, prevent jurors from consiering expert testimony in the correct light?
(Welcome to my A/B test. For the other version of this post, click here.)
I feel like Ben Maller, a sports radio broadcaster who likes to take three seemingly unrelated phrases and spin them into a monologue.
For this post, the three phrases are “common sense,” “succinct,” and “expert juror testimony.”
I want to (succinctly) pose the question, “Is ‘common sense’ enough for a jury to consider expert testimony?'”
Common Sense
Mitch Wagner recently shared a New Yorker article by Matthew Hutson that claimed that artificial intelligence was lacking in “common sense.” Here is one of the examples cited in the article:
By definition, common sense is something everyone has; it doesn’t sound like a big deal. But imagine living without it and it comes into clearer focus. Suppose you’re a robot visiting a carnival, and you confront a fun-house mirror; bereft of common sense, you might wonder if your body has suddenly changed.
But is the human ability to discern that one’s body was NOT modified truly “common sense”? I argued otherwise in a comment on Wagner’s LinkedIn post.
But is there really a difference between “common sense” and the data acquisition that AI engines perform?
Take the fun-house mirror example in the article. When I first encountered a fun-house mirror, I would either (a) think like a robot and wonder if my body had changed, or (b) draw upon a vast reservoir of past experiences with mirrors and bent objects to deduce that this particular mirror had properties that would display my body in a different way. A person who had never encountered a mirror or a bent object would not have the “common sense” to realize how a fun-house mirror operates.
Perhaps I’m wrong, but it seems that everyone takes cues from their past experiences (touching a hot stove, or watching “Perry Mason” or “C.S.I.” on TV), and that helps form our “common sense.”
Succinct
If you read my original comment on Wagner’s post, you’ll notice that I only reproduced the first part here, since the other parts weren’t relevant to this post.
Concise writing is something that Becca Phengvath of Robin Writers reminded us about in a recent post. She started by telling a story about a meeting with one of her college English teachers to review a writing assignment.
“This is good,” she said. But I felt her preparing to say more.
“But look what happens when you remove ‘able to’,” she added, pointing to several spots where I wrote the phrase. “It’s never really needed, see?”
She read a few of my sentences with “able to” omitted and I was shocked at how it immediately strengthened my writing. Since then, I have very very rarely used that phrase in my writing thanks to her.
I liked this post so much that I shared in on various social accounts, with the following comment:
I really need to do this more often.
I should do this more.
Expert Juror Testimony
Now let’s get to the meat of the post. (I could have left the first two parts of the post out, I guess, but I wanted to provide some background.)
As I’ve previously noted, the 2009 NAS report on forensic science has revolutionized fingerprint identification and a number of other forensic disciplines.
One part of this revolution was the Department of Justice 2018 document entitled “UNIFORM LANGUAGE FOR TESTIMONY AND REPORTS FOR THE FORENSIC LATENT PRINT DISCIPLINE.” A PDF version of the report can be found here.
This document applies to Department of Justice examiners who are authorized to prepare reports and provide expert witness testimony regarding the forensic examination of latent print evidence.
Based upon the NAS report and subsequent efforts, Part IV of the DOJ document (“Qualifications and Limitations of Forensic Latent Print Examinations”) sets some clear guidelines about how a latent print examiner should describe his or her findings.
So a pre-2009 latent print examiner who appeared in court and said “I am 100% certain that these two fingerprints belong to the same person, to the exclusion of all other persons, because I have never been wrong in the last 25 years” would fail the 2018 DOJ criteria.
(Remember that even experienced examiners have been wrong before, as was shown in the Brandon Mayfield case.)
But would a jury know that?
That’s what CSAFE discussed in a recent post, “AAFS 2022 RECAP: UNDERSTANDING JUROR COMPREHENSION OF FORENSIC TESTIMONY: ASSESSING JURORS’ DECISION MAKING AND EVIDENCE EVALUATION.” Feel free to read the entire article, or if you like you can read my “succinct” excerpt from two portions of the article:
Koolmees and her colleagues examined whether jurors could distinguish low-quality testimony from high-quality testimony of forensic experts, using the language guidelines released by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2018 as an indicator of quality….
Only when comparing the conditions of zero guideline violations and four and five violations were there any changes in guilty verdicts, signifying jurors may notice a change in the quality of forensic testimony only when the quality is severely low.
Think about it. While forensic and criminal justice professionals, who have been immersed in forensic science testimony debates for over a decade, would be unimpressed by someone testifying that two fingerprints are a “100% match,” there’s a good chance that a jury would be very impressed with an “expert” who provided such convincing testimony.
So this raises the question of whether the NAS report, for all of its revolutionary effects, will have any true results in courtroom testimony.
Will jurors heed the advice from the DOJ guidelines to accurately consider the testimony of a forensic expert?
Or will the jurors’ “common sense,” based on old Perry Mason and C.S.I. TV shows, prevent jurors from consiering expert testimony in the correct light?
I’ve worked in the general area of contactless fingerprint capture for years, initially while working for a NIST CRADA partner. While most of the NIST CRADA partners are still pursuing contactless fingerprint technology, there are also new entrants.
In the pre-COVID days, the primary advantage of contactless fingerprint capture was speed. As I noted in an October 2021 post:
Actually this effort launched before that, as there were efforts in 2004 and following years to capture a complete set of fingerprints within 15 seconds; those efforts led, among other things, to the smartphone software we are seeing today.
By 2016, several companies had entered into cooperative research and development agreements with NIST to develop contactless fingerprint capture software, either for dedicated devices or for smartphones. Most of those early CRADA participants are still around today, albeit under different names.
I’ve previously written posts about two of these CRADA partners, Telos ID (previously Diamond Fortress) and Sciometrics (the supplier for Integrated Biometrics).
But these aren’t the only players in the contactless fingerprint market. There are always new entrants in a market where there is opportunity.
A month before I wrote my post about Integrated Biometrics/Sciometrics’ SlapShot, a company called Tech5 released its own product.
T5-AirSnap Finger uses a smartphone’s built-in camera to perform finger detection, enhancement, image processing and scaling, generating images that can be transmitted for identity verification or registration within seconds, according to the announcement. The resulting images are suitable for use with standard AFIS solutions, and comparison against legacy datasets…
Parthe has noted the importance of smartphone-based contactless fingerprint capture:
“We all carry these awesome computers in our hands,” Parthe explains. “It’s a perfectly packaged hardware device that is ideal for any capture technology. Smartphones are powerful compute devices on the edge, with a nice integrated camera with auto-focus and flash. And now phones also come with multiple cameras which can help with better focus and depth estimation. This allows the users to take photos of their fingers and the software takes care of the rest. I’d just like to point out here that we’re talking about using the phone’s camera to capture biometrics and using a smartphone to take the place of a dedicated reader. We’re not talking about the in-built fingerprint acquisition we’re all familiar with on many devices which is the means of accessing the device itself.”
I’ve made a similar point before. While dedicated devices may not completely disappear, multi-purpose devices that we already have are the preferable way to go.
For more information about T5-AirSnap Finger, visit this page.
Tech5’s results for NIST’s Proprietary Fingerprint Template (PFT) Evaluation III, possibly using an algorithm similar to that in T5-AirSnap Finger, are detailed here.
Yes, I have completed training on forensic face recognition, but that doesn’t qualify me as an expert in courtroom testimony. (Forensic face recognition expert testimony isn’t admissible in court anyway, but you get the idea.)
But even I am well aware that the forensic world changed dramatically in 2009.
Before 2009, the dialog below only represents a slight exaggeration.
Question: Why do you say that these two fingerprints belong to the same person?
Answer: Because I said so.
After 2009, specifically after the release of what is called “the NAS report,” there has been an effort to make forensic science…a science.
Ideally, this means that when a fingerprint expert testifies in court, the expert can state that there is a 99.9978% probability that two fingerprints belong to the same person. Or something like that.
It is the position of the IAl that examiners are encouraged to articulate conclusion decisions as specifically as possible, as to not overstate decisions regarding source attribution. In addition to stating conclusions, examiners are encouraged to state the basis for resulting conclusions; including the associative strength and limitations. The strength and limitations of conclusions may include the quality and quantity of data, the validity of method/mathematical model used, and the repeatability of the conclusion. Examiners are encouraged to continually reassess methods and/or mathematical models used to arrive at the best conclusions possible.
International Association for Identification, Position Statement on Conclusions, Qualified Opinions, and Probability Modeling, February 5, 2017.
In other words, while the IAI discourages the use of the old “Because I said so” articulation, the conclusions stated in court lean more toward qualitative rather than quantitative criteria. There’s not a probabilistic model for fingerprints.
Or, as Mike French notes, there’s not a publicly available probabilistic model.
As organizations like the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence (CSAFE) explore the viability of statistical modeling in pattern evidence disciplines, they will probably notice that AFIS (automated fingerprint identification system) vendors have already done decades of research, and those vendors have fielded operational systems, to solve the same type of problem forensic researchers are now investigating.
French notes a number of challenges to using AFIS vendor data to derive probabilistic models for fingerprints, but the chief challenge is the fact that the AFIS vendor data is proprietary and therefore carefully guarded. After all, AFIS vendors understandably don’t want their competitors to be able to reverse engineer their algorithms.
If you read French’s article, you’ll see that even if the AFIS vendors made all of the relevant data available, significant testing would still have to take place before reliable, fit for purpose probabilistic models can be created.
Are there other ways to develop a probabilistic fingerprint model? Maybe, but these would require (among other things) access to a lot of fingerprints, and considering the resistance of privacy advocates to biometric collection—even when such collection can mitigate privacy advocate concern about biometric inaccuracy—the chances of collecting a bunch of fingerprints for a probability study are approximately 23 (and me?) in 7 billion.
Back when automated fingerprint identification systems (AFIS) were originally expanded to become automated fingerprint/palmprint identification systems (AFPIS), a common rationale for the expansion was the large number of unsolved latent palmprints at crime scenes.
The statistic that everyone cited was a statistic that 30% of all latent friction ridge prints at crime scenes were from palmprints. Here’s a citation from the National Institute of Justice.
Anecdotally, it is estimated that approximately 30% of comparison cases involve palm impressions.
Note that the NIJ took care to include the word “anecdotally.” Others don’t.
It is estimated that 30 percent of latent prints found at crime scenes come from palms.
But who provided the initial “30% of latents are palms” estimate long ago? And what was the basis for this estimate? This critical information seems to have been lost.
Now I don’t have a problem with imprecise estimates, provided that the assumptions that go behind the estimate are well-documented. I’ve done this many times myself.
But sadly, any assumptions for the “30% of latents are palms” figure have disappeared over the years, and only the percentage remains.
Is there any contemporary evidence that can be used to check the 30% estimate?
Yes.
The blind proficiency study wasn’t blind regarding the test data
A Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Science study (downloadable here) was published earlier this year. Although the study was devoted to another purpose, it touched upon this particular issue.
The “Latent print quality in blind proficiency testing: Using quality metrics to examine laboratory performance” study obviously needed some data, so it analyzed a set of latent prints examined by the Houston Forensic Science Center (HFSC) over a multi-year period.
In the winter of 2017, HFSC implemented a blind quality control program in latent print comparison. Since its implementation, the Quality Division within the laboratory has developed and inserted 290 blind cases/requests for analysis into the latent print comparison unit as of August 4, 2020….
Of the 290 blind cases inserted into casework, we were able to obtain print images for 144 cases, with report dates spanning approximately two years (i.e., January 9, 2018 to January 8, 2020)….
In total, examiners reviewed 376 latent prints submitted as part of the 144 blind cases/requests for analysis.
So, out of those 376 latent prints, how many were from palms?
The majority of latent prints were fingerprints (94.3%; n = 350) or palm prints (4.9%; n = 18). Very few were joint impressions or unspecified impressions (0.8%; n = 3)….
The remaining 5 of 376 prints were not attributed to an anatomical source because examiners determined them to be of no comparative value and did not consider them to be latent prints.
For those who are math-challenged, 5 percent is not equal to 30 percent. In fact, 5 percent is much less than 30 percent. (And 4.9% is even less, if you want to get precise about it.)
Now I’ll grant that this is just one study, and other latent examinations may have wildly different percentages. At a minimum, though, this data should cause us to question the universally-accepted “30%” figure.
As any scientific institute that desires funding would proclaim, further research is needed.
And I’ll grant that. Well, I won’t grant it, but some government or private funding entity might.
Let me kick off this post by quoting from another post that I wrote:
I’ve always been of the opinion that technology is moving away from specialized hardware to COTS hardware. For example, the fingerprint processing and matching that used to require high-end UNIX computers with custom processor boards in the 1990s can now be accomplished on consumer-grade smartphones.
Further evidence of this was promoted in advance of #connectID by Integrated Biometrics.
And yes, for those following Integrated Biometrics’ naming conventions, there IS a 1970s movie called “Slap Shot,” but I don’t think it has anything to do with crime solving. Unless you count hockey “enforcers” as law enforcement. And the product apparently wasn’t named by Integrated Biometrics anyway.
SlapShot supports the collection of Fingerprint and facial images suitable for use with state of the art matching algorithms. Fingerprints can now be captured by advanced software that enables the camera in your existing smart phones to generate images with a quality capable of precise identification. Facial recognition and metadata supplement the identification process for any potential suspect or person of interest.
This groundbreaking approach turns almost any smart phone into a biometric capture device, and with minimal integration, your entire force can leverage their existing smart phones to capture fingerprints for identification and verification, receiving matching results in seconds from a centralized repository.
Great, you say! But there’s one more thing. Two more things, actually:
SlapShot functions on Android devices that support Lollipop or later operating systems and relies on the device’s rear high-resolution camera. Images captured from the camera are automatically processed on the device in the background and converted into EBTS files. Once the fingerprint image is taken, the fingerprint matcher in the cloud returns results instantly.
The SlapShot SDK allows developers to capture contactless fingerprints and other biometrics within their own apps via calls to the SlapShot APIs.
Note that SlapShot is NOT intended for end users, but for developers to incorporate into existing applications. Also note that it is (currently) ONLY supported on Android, not iOS.
But this does illustrate the continuing move away from dedicated devices, including Integrated Biometrics’ own line of dedicated devices, to multi-use devices that can also perform forensic capture and perform or receive forensic matching results.
And no, Integrated Biometrics is not cannibalizing its own market. I say this for two reasons.
First, there are still going to be customers who will want dedicated devices, for a variety of reasons.
Second, if Integrated Biometrics doesn’t compete in the smartphone contactless fingerprint capture market, it will lose sales to the companies that DO compete in this market.
Contactless fingerprint capture has been pursued by multiple companies for years, ever since the NIST CRADA was issued a few years ago. (Integrated Biometrics’ partner Sciometrics was one of those early CRADA participants, along with others.) Actually this effort launched before that, as there were efforts in 2004 and following years to capture a complete set of fingerprints within 15 seconds; those efforts led, among other things, to the smartphone software we are seeing today. Not only from Integrated Biometrics/Sciometrics, but also from other CRADA participants. (Don’t forget this one.)
Bredemarket 