The world’s largest biometrics surveillance company wants to add your driver’s license photo to its digital library, which already has collected and processed some 3 billion faces.

Idemia, based in Paris, is at the center of a push to create digital driver’s licenses, also known as mobile driver’s licenses, that could allow motorists to flash an app on their smartphones instead of showing traditional plastic ID cards to prove they can drive, vote or drink beer.

We are WITTE Digital and the digital division of the leading automotive supplier WITTE Automotive, headquartered in Velbert. We are here to develop innovative, digital automotive solutions for the mobility of tomorrow. As part of the worldwide active group of companies, we stand for decades of. BASF Digital Solutions GmbH is a wholly-owned group company of BASF SE, whose service portfolio ranges from designing and optimizing business processes throughout the value chain to the consulting, development and operation of IT systems. 1,700 of the approximately 2,000 employees work at the Ludwigshafen site (as of December 31, 2019).

Idemia systems are responsible for issuing traditional licenses in 42 states that account for 80 percent of all U.S. drivers.

Idemia is a multinational company that has partnered with U.S. security and law enforcement agencies for decades to provide multilevel data-gathering, including fingerprinting, airport security and facial recognition technologies.

But massive data breaches such as those at Facebook and Equifax have put Idemia under scrutiny, especially among privacy and digital rights groups. Critics say the company is vulnerable to hackers and government abuse as it fosters an “Orwellian vision” of a monitored society in which privacy and civil liberties yield to intrusion in the name of public safety and security.

Thank you to the 3000+ attendees that took part in Masters of Digital 2021! You can find the session recordings below, and if you have any questions about this event, or future editions, please email Kivanc Akil – kivanc.akil@digitaleurope.org. Making Europe “fit for the digital age” is an undertaking that requires cooperation. The plan for Digital Equipment Corporation was finalized and they received $70,000 to launch their new company. In sticking with the theme of keeping expenses light (not only for customers but for the company as well), they set up shop in an old wool mill in Maynard, MA. The first product DEC created and sold was its Digital Laboratory.

“Despite its reach into the private and commercial affairs of most Americans, Idemia is not a household name,” said Twila Brase, a digital privacy advocate based in St. Paul, Minnesota, who penned a sharp critique of the firm last year. “However, this global company is acquainted with most American citizens, whose private information flows through its equipment, databases and software products.”

Idemia did not respond to requests for comment. The company’s website says it stands for “augmented identity.”

“In designing our market-leading solutions, we rely on the most physical, natural and authentic verification: the body’s own biometric data,” the company website says. “Your identity can be verified with a simple glance or the tap of a finger which means that your identity cannot be stolen, imitated, jeopardized or corrupted. You are in direct control of your personal information.”

The Departments of Defense and Homeland Security and the FBI did not respond to requests for comment about their contracts with Idemia.

Security concerns

Idemia emerged from the 2017 merger of the French digital security firm Oberthur Technologies and Morpho S.A.S., a French multinational corporation that specialized in security and identity technologies.

The company’s website boasts revenue of more than $3 billion, 14,000 employees of more than 80 nationalities and clients in 180 countries.

Idemia’s U.S. headquarters is in Reston, Virginia. Information that the company collects every day flows into databases at the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security and the FBI, where millions of personal, biographic and biometric files are kept on Americans and foreigners.

Critics of the company say it’s unclear how long Idemia stores data because so many details are categorized as “classified” or too sensitive to national security to be made public.

“They have an Orwellian vision of control,” said Ms. Brase, a public health nurse who wrote the 2018 book “Big Brother in the Exam Room: The Dangerous Truth about Electronic Health Records.”

Jennifer Lynch, director of surveillance litigation for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based digital rights group, has testified before Congress that lawmakers need to increase oversight of the government’s “broad expansion of data collection.”

According to the Center on Privacy and Technology at the Georgetown Law Center, most adult Americans are already in a facial recognition database because of how governments format driver’s licenses and passport photos for such use. The center notes that 31 states currently allow law enforcement to search driver’s license image databases with facial recognition software.

Idemia boasts on its website that “criminal justice systems throughout the United States use [Idemia] facial recognition technology to identify persons of interest and enhance their investigation capabilities.” In addition to Idemia, Amazon, Apple and Facebook are considered to be leaders in developing the technology.

Ms. Lynch warned that too few federal and state regulations sufficiently govern police use of facial recognition technology and that poor data management and “a high rate of misidentifications” have plagued agencies such as Homeland Security. She noted that the department’s inspector general recently criticized the office of biometric identity management for failing to train personnel properly and for relying too heavily on third-party data collectors.

In an interview, Ms. Lynch said Idemia poses a threat because of its position at the center of so many government databases.

“One algorithm hashes all of [Idemia’s] biometric data,” she said. “If a hacker gained access to that proprietary algorithm, they potentially could have access to the biometric data of every person in the database.”

Government agencies also could easily check across all of the databases even if they are not cleared to do so, she said.

‘Can of legal worms’

In India, Idemia is involved in Aadhaar, the government’s biometric identification program, which collects, processes and stores the iris patterns, personal details and fingerprints of 1.2 billion Indian nationals.

Drivers Digital Identification Solutions Group Of Companies Llc

Aadhaar has been subject to serious security breaches. Access to identities it verifies has been sold for less than $10 online.

Idemia now is pushing for mobile driver’s licenses as a form of universal digital ID.

Jenny Openshaw, chief of North American sales for Idemia, discussed the company’s efforts to develop mobile driver’s licenses in October at the Money 20/20 financial conference in Las Vegas.

According to industry reports, Ms. Openshaw said Idemia was working with 38 state driver’s license programs and that much of the work focused on mobile versions using facial recognition technology to unlock access to the app.

Police say mobile driver’s licenses connected to a central database could make their work safer and easier because updates could provide information about a motorist’s license suspension, change of address or outstanding tickets and warrants.

Civil liberties advocates worry that multiple state mobile driver’s license programs could morph into a de facto national ID system without any significant public debate.

Alan Butler, senior counsel at the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, warned that a host of thorny civil liberty, privacy and data security issues must be addressed before mobile driver’s licenses are widely adopted, especially the question of whether police could remotely access a person’s smartphone hosting the app. Such searches, he said, would be illegal without a warrant.

“Device-to-device communications is its own can of legal worms,” Mr. Butler said.

At the Money 20/20 conference, Ms. Openshaw engaged in a panel discussion titled “Can Secure Private Digital ID Still Allow Us to Enjoy Life?” She said several government agencies were working to establish standards for mobile driver’s licenses, according to industry reports.

TOKYO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Toshiba Corporation (TOKYO: 6502) and Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation (collectively Toshiba), industry leaders in solutions for large-scale optimization problems, today announced the Ballistic Simulated Bifurcation Algorithm (bSB) and the Discrete Simulated Bifurcation Algorithm (dSB), new algorithms that far surpass the performance of Toshiba’s previous Simulated Bifurcation Algorithm (SB). The new algorithms will be applied to finding solutions to highly complex problems in areas as diverse as portfolio management, drug development and logistics management.

Introduced in April 2019, the previous SB broke new ground as a platform for finding solutions to combinatorial optimization problems, surpassing other approaches by a factor of 10^*1. Toshiba has now extended this achievement with two new algorithms that apply innovative approaches, such as a quasi-quantum tunneling effect, to performance improvement, allowing them to acquire optimal solutions (exact solutions) for large-scale combinatorial optimization problems that challenge the capabilities of their predecessor. Implemented on a 16-GPU machine, dSB can find a nearly optimal solution of a one-million-bit problem, the world's largest scale combinatorial problem yet reported in scientific papers, in 30 minutes—a computation that would take 14 months on a typical CPU-based computer. The research results were published in the online academic journal, Science Advances, on February 3 (EST)^*2.

The new algorithms have different characteristics. bSB is optimized and named for speed of operation, and finds good approximate solutions in a short time. It generates fewer errors than a previously reported Adiabatic Simulated Bifurcation Algorithm (aSB)^*3, and so returns faster, more accurate results. Implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA), dubbed the ballistic simulated bifurcation machine (bSBM), it obtains a good solution to a 2,000-bit problem approximately 10 times faster than the previous aSB machine (aSBM) (Figure 1).

dSB is a high-accuracy algorithm. Although implemented in a classical computer, it nonetheless arrives at optimal solutions faster than current quantum machines. Its name is derived from the replacement of continuous variables with discrete variables in equations of motion. This exhibits a quasi-quantum tunneling effect that breaks through the limits of approaches grounded in classical mechanics, reaching the optimal solution of the 2000-bit problem.

Toshiba has implemented dSB on a FPGA and built a discrete simulated bifurcation machine (dSBM) that achieves a higher speed than other machines in terms of computation times required to obtain optimal solutions for various problems (Figure 2).

Implemented on a 16-GPU machine, the dSBM solved a one-million-bit problem, the largest yet reported in scientific papers, and arrived at a nearly optimal solution in 30 minutes—20,000 times faster than a CPU-based simulated annealing machine, which would take 14 months to carry out the computation (Figure 3).

In applying the two algorithms to real-world problems, Toshiba proposes bSB for applications that require an immediate response, and dSB for applications that require high accuracy, even if it takes a little longer time.

Toshiba expects the new algorithms to bring higher efficiencies to industry, business and complex decision-making by addressing combinatorial optimization problems in fields including investment portfolios, drug development, and delivery route planning.

Commenting on the algorithms, Hayato Goto, Chief Research Scientist at Toshiba Corporation’s Corporate Research & Development Center, said: “We face many real-world problems where we must find the optimal solution among a huge number of choices, and we must also deal with combinatorial explosion, where the number of combination patterns increases exponentially as a problem increases in scale. This is why research into special-purpose computers for combinatorial optimization is being carried out worldwide. Our aim is to develop a software solution—algorithms that can solve large-scale combinatorial optimization problems quickly and accurately, and contribute to the realization of higher efficiencies.”

Toshiba will offer the newly developed simulated bifurcation algorithms as a GPU-based cloud service and as an on-premises version implemented on an FPGA within 2021.

(Notes)

About Toshiba Corporation

Toshiba Corporation leads a global group of companies that combines knowledge and capabilities from over 140 years of experience in a wide range of businesses—from energy and social infrastructure to electronic devices—with world-class capabilities in information processing, digital and AI technologies. These distinctive strengths support Toshiba’s continued evolution toward becoming an Infrastructure Services Company that promotes data utilization and digitization, and one of the world’s leading cyber-physical-systems technology companies. Guided by the Basic Commitment of the Toshiba Group, “Committed to People, Committed to the Future,” Toshiba contributes to society’s positive development with services and solutions that lead to a better world. The Group and its 130,000 employees worldwide secured annual sales surpassing 3.4 trillion yen (US$31.1 billion) in fiscal year 2019. www.toshiba.co.jp/worldwide/about/index.html

About Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation

As the driver of Toshiba Group’s digital solutions business, Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation delivers system integration and digital service solutions that support companies in accelerating their digital transformation, and also plays a central role in Toshiba’s transition to become one of the world’s leading cyber-physical technology companies, with advanced capabilities extending from manufacturing to AI. https://www.global.toshiba/ww/company/digitalsolution.html

Drivers Digital Identification Solutions Group Of Companies Inc

Business website of Toshiba Simulated Bifurcation Machine: https://www.toshiba-sol.co.jp/en/pro/sbm/index.htm