Can Facial Recognition Improve A Bureaucratic State Agency?
I was more than a little surprised to find out last month that the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV, the cause of many headaches and squanderer of countless hours of valuable time over my many years as a licensed, tax-paying driver) is planning to use biometric facial-recognition technology to add another layer of security to the process of issuing drivers’ licenses and ID cards. My surprise was based on a number of things, maybe the most basic being that this is Connecticut — the state that issued the same boring blue and white license plates for 25 years before switching to a different but equally boring blue and white license plate two years ago. Change doesn’t come quickly around these parts, at least as far as the DMV is concerned. One must physically go to one of a dwindling number of crowded DMV locations to accomplish virtually anything having to do with the act of driving or owning a vehicle. This typically involves taking a number (the old paper tickets issued a
