Exile with Burnt Fingertips - A Woman's Journey Through Biometrics (Winter 2009)

Exile with Burnt Fingertips - A Woman's Journey Through Biometrics (Winter 2009)

In the winter of 2009, a woman stood before an immigration inspector at Narita Airport in Japan. Her name is Lin Long, a 27-year-old Chinese woman. She had a history of illegal stay in Japan and deportation. Since 2007, Japan has enforced a biometric identification system that requires foreigners to take a photo of their face and fingerprints of both hands when entering the country. However, Linh Long chose a way to overcome this barrier: he decided to erase his own fingerprints.

Lynn Long spent about $14,600, or nearly 1.35 million Japanese yen, to have her fingerprints changed. Her ten fingers were burned, cut, and sutured into a new skin pattern. The altered fingers were no longer proof of who she was, but a new mask to contain her past. And so, with a passport in hand, she made her way back to Japan, this time with a passport belonging to someone who looked a lot like her.

At the immigration checkpoint at Narita Airport, facial recognition passed without incident. Since the passport photo and the person's appearance were similar, the system did not suspect anything. However, the machine detected an anomaly during the fingerprint authentication stage. The information on the finger read did not match any of the registration data. At that moment, Linh Long's journey came to a halt. The examiner moved on to manual verification and found unnatural surgical scars on her fingertips. Stitch marks, burn-like distortions - it was the very price she had paid to erase her past.

After the pursuit, Lin Long's true identity was revealed and she was caught red-handed violating the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act. This incident caused ripples not only in Japan but also in the international community. The BBC, CNN, and other international media covered the event extensively, and the question "Is biometrics really safe? The question "Are biometrics really safe?

After the incident, Japan's Ministry of Justice and Immigration Bureau began to introduce technology to detect fingerprint alterations, to perform multi-factor matching with facial recognition, and to strengthen human judgment by emphasizing the visual and intuitive judgment of screening officers. This case highlights the fact that biometric technology, no matter how precise, is not perfect in the face of human ingenuity and persistence.

Linh Long's attempt failed. But what his fingertips tell us is the will of a human being to live beyond the system, and a painful testimony that illuminates the strains of today's surveillance society.