Because of Israel's history and location, security has always been a priority for the country's authorities, even as they try to maintain the routines of everyday life. The tension between those interests resurfaced in 1998 when officials sought a way to handle the surge of Holy Land pilgrims expected for the millennium celebrations.

Ben Gurion Airport, the country's only international facility, was aging and already strained by the millions of passengers who annually passed through it. Israel's solution was a trusted-traveler program that resembles the U.S. Homeland Security Department's Passenger Accelerated Service System (INSPASS), which was already in place at several U.S. international airports.

U.S. officials launched INSPASS as a response to a 1990 law that required DHS to cut waiting periods in airport immigration halls to no more than 45 minutes. INSPASS allowed trusted foreign passengers who had previously been cleared to use special kiosks where they could quickly verify their identities using hand-recognition biometrics.

The Ben Gurion system, in operation within three months after its contract award in April 1998, quickly enrolled more than 160,000 citizens and used four kiosks to process them. The airport now has 22 kiosks — eight for departures and 14 for arrivals — to handle 250,000 enrollees.

The Israelis' experience offers U.S. security officials some lessons about the influence of cultural and policy contexts on the development of technology-based security systems.

How it works

At Ben Gurion, passengers who want to participate in the trusted traveler program receive a smart card when they enroll. The card stores an array of encrypted personal information, from criminal histories to the dozens of measurements of fingers, knuckle shapes and distances between joints in the hands.

As part of the flight check-in process, trusted passengers go to a kiosk and swipe their smart cards through a reader and then place their hands over a biometric scanner.

Once the scanner verifies a passenger's identity, the system prints a coupon that allows the passenger to whisk through the rest of the check-in process.

Since 1998, the kiosks have successfully handled about 5 million transactions. For members of the program, the system cuts wait times from two hours to as little as 10 seconds during peak periods.

"It helped that Israelis were fairly enamored and interested in biometrics to start with, and there is no real social stigma there to using hand geometry," said Jeff Poulson, a technical consultant at EDS' Access Controls Solutions Division, which developed and installed the INSPASS and Ben Gurion systems. "There are other biometrics that are just as good, such as fingerprints, but they are associated with criminality and hand geometry is less threatening."

The Israelis had another purpose for the Ben Gurion program, Poulson said, because they were also looking to install biometrics systems for border control. They considered the airport project to be a fairly controlled environment in which to evaluate the technology.