Big Brother Inc.

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Guy Scott nips into his cubby-hole lab in a far corner of Cross Match Technologies' headquarters--a reclaimed ice-skating rink in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.--and proudly displays a postage-stamp-size bit of translucent gray film that looks like debris from a darkroom floor. It is the heart of a new machine that he says will revolutionize the global financial system, bring the multibillion identity-theft racket to a halt and make teenagers behave in cars.

The New Zealand--born engineer isn't known as the Mad Kiwi for nothing. But his colleagues and financial backers believe in him. Cross Match, a privately held company, plans to put Scott's device, called the Authorizer, into production sometime this fall, charging $10 or so a copy. The gray film, a piece of plastic-coated acoustic ceramic one-ten-thousandth of an inch thick, is for Authorizer's touch pad, to be embedded in a cell phone. To make a credit-card transaction, say, a buyer presses his finger to the touch pad, triggering an imperceptible pulse of energy that makes the film oscillate. The resulting ultrasound image is captured as a digital image file called a biometric identifier, which is a physical feature that has been measured and converted into computer language so it can be compared against a database. If his print matches, the credit-card charge goes through.

The Authorizer is among the first consumer gadgets to evolve from the biometrics industry, which, after years of promise, is on the verge of rapid growth as government-mandated security plans become operational. With the threat of terrorism now a long-term concern, biometric-identification systems are blossoming around the world. To stop bad guys at the border, for instance, the U.S. is embarking on a program called U.S.-VISIT, for U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology, which was mandated by Congress in 2002. Biometric technologies are the linchpins of the new system, expected to cost $10 billion over the next decade. The technology is not just to keep track of foreign visitors either. If you're leaving the country, get ready to be face printed. The U.S. State Department is retooling its passport production process and by the end of next year will issue new passports with an embedded chip containing a facial biometric and biographical data. This will enable the government to boost security without resorting to passport fingerprinting, which could incite fears of Big Brother.

With more and more applications coming online, the biometrics industry's global revenues, $719 million in 2003, should hit $4.6 billion by 2008, according to the International Biometric Group in New York City. "The U.S.-VISIT program is by far the most important national-security program in the world right now," says security-technology analyst Prianka Chopra of Frost & Sullivan, a New York City market-consulting firm. "Every country is looking to the U.S. to see what the program is doing and what technologies will be used." Chopra expects the global biometrics industry to grow at a compounded annual rate of 35%.