Interpol makes first border arrest using Biometric Hub to ID suspect

European police have for the first time made an arrest after remotely checking Interpol's trove of biometric data to identify a suspected smuggler. The fugitive migrant, we're told, gave a fake name and phony identification documents at a police check in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, while traveling toward Western Europe. …

[Rikki Tikki]

So, in 2 months of operation, with up to umpteen thousand searches per day, Interpol have arrested precisely *one* suspect? Always assuming that this guy was in fact travelling with fake documents, rather than the system identifying the wrong person.

Why am I so cynical about police press releases? :(

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

The false positives are always going to be the worry with systems like this. It will really get bad when they (inevitably) decide to start using AI because more false positives = more real positives (and more work for border officials than before the system came in to begin with).

[jmch]

" in 2 months of operation, with up to umpteen thousand searches per day, Interpol have arrested precisely *one* suspect? "

*If* that's true, that's actually pretty good. Hundreds of arrests would indicate either a high false positive rate (although TBH we know nothing about how many people were wrongly stopped before this 1 arrest was made), or that it was being used as a trawl net for trivial offences. Also good to note that this is actually a good way of implementing biometrics. Comparing a live photo to a "whole population" photo database is bound to give dozens of positive matches. Comparing to a select group of 'Interpol's most wanted' (ie thousands rather than hundreds of millions) is far less likely to flag false positives.

[DS999]

That should be corrected to say Interpol has ANNOUNCED arresting one person. They may have arrested others who were false positives, then had to let them go. Obviously they are not going to publicize those failures, though if they're happening eventually some of the people will take their story to the press and it'll be become known.

[Clarecats]

Genderist

"Interpol and Idemia have worked together for years. In 1999, he police organization"

Is there a she police organisation?