From Military.com:
“Navy Recruits Are Now Using
Their Fingerprints to Sign Enlistment Documents”
The Navy has successfully
processed more than 700,000 new recruit forms using fingerprints, the service
announced last week. The new biometric method to sign documents went into
effect Oct. 1 and has reduced the amount of paperwork new sailors need to
report to boot camp to three pieces of paper: their orders, their meal pass and
their medical form. Using fingerprints to sign documents has enabled recruiters
to work digitally the entire time instead of printing pages for new sailors to
sign with a pen and then scanning them back into the system. Gary Morse,
assistant project coordinator for the Personalized Recruiting for Immediate and
Delayed Enlistments (PRIDE) application, said in a news release that the change
will allow recruiters to save time and money. "If our goal is to add
[40,000 to 45,000] Sailors to our system," Morse said, "and it takes
us processing nearly 60,000 people to do that, it's a lot of paper, a lot of
ink and a lot of wear and tear on printers." Before Oct. 1, each
prospective sailor had an enlistment kit about 150 pages thick. Navy recruiters
need to print four copies of those, so processing 60,000 people used 36 million
pieces of paper and resulted in a total cost of about $2.5 million. It took the
Navy years to create the biometric program and cost about $180,000, the service
said. It had to work with Adobe software engineers to create a custom plug-in
for the forms, some of which had to be redesigned so they could be signed
biometrically. "I honestly do not believe that is the most powerful
piece," said Dr. Kevin Sullivan, Navy Recruiting Command (NRC) deputy
commander and executive director. "What is more powerful is the efficiency
we got overall. For the first time, we have parallel processing." Parallel
processing is when all documents created while acquiring the new recruits'
information are stored digitally in an encrypted database. That lets the NRC,
Navy Personnel Command and Recruit Training Command access the original
documents and perform further processing of new sailors. Even though the new
biometric method was piloted by the Navy, any Defense Department asset will be
able to use it. "It's one thing to capture a fingerprint. It's another to
do something with it," Morse said.
^ From what I understand this
system currently only uses a person’s fingerprint to prove their identity and to
show agreement with whatever was on the document. If that’s the case then I
think this is a cost-effective way of dealing with the documents since they are
stored digitally and can be accessed by anyone with permission around the world.
I only have some concerns if this new system was to be used for other things
like Government/Military orders and sensitive information. In that respect I
think there should be a back-up paper copy made in case the system goes down or
is hacked. ^
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