After wading through airport security and a turbulent trans-Atlantic flight, the last thing I wanted was more friction arriving back in the USA. However, I was looking forward to using Global Entry, a voluntary Department of Homeland Security program that, after a thorough background check, allows travelers to prove their identity through a quick fingerprint scan at an airport kiosk to skip the line. As a fingerprint researcher at NIST for the past decade, I was excited to finally use the system — face recognition gets all the press, but fingerprints are the real biometric pièce de résistance. It is still thrilling for me to see the progress we’ve made as an industry deploying biometric recognition—something so inherently complex delivered in fast and easy-to-use solutions.

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