Word: matchings
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...notion of a cashless economy facilitated by databanks of digitized body parts is still kind of far out. But then, so are most things about Cross Match. The company was founded in 1996 by Scott, a medical ultrasound specialist, and two fellow engineers turned garage inventors, Jim Davis, who worked on the engine of the SR-71 Blackbird at Lockheed, and Ellis Betensky, who improved Vivitar zoom lenses and pioneered computer-aided design for cameras...
...time, the FBI's Criminal Justice Information System (CJIS) facility in Clarksburg, W.Va., was scanning its vast collection of ink-and-paper fingerprint cards into a digital database that could be searched by computer. The Cross Match founders spotted an empty niche for light, rugged, relatively inexpensive live-scan fingerprint machines. Borrowing $250,000 from relatives and friends, they came up with a 23-lb., $10,000 optical scanner that produced high-resolution, forensic-quality print images. It could fit in a backpack, and its calibration was not thrown off by jarring from a squad car or humvee...
...Cross Match reported revenues of $25 million. It now employs 165 people to make print scanners of different sizes. Even Martha Stewart noticed. "It's a new machine," she told Barbara Walters in November. "You don't have to get that ink all over your fingers...
After 9/11, the FBI and the military snapped up Cross Match scanners for deployment in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay to fingerprint al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Those prints, along with thousands of unidentified ones lifted from uncovered safe houses around the globe and from arrests made by allies, were fed into a classified terrorist-fingerprint database at the FBI's West Virginia fingerprinting facility. Cross Match scanners were sent to Iraq to book captured terrorists, insurgents and Saddam Hussein. (Saddam was annoyed, according to agents posted to Iraq. "This is how you treat criminals!" he is said to have...
Moreover, it is hard to understand why the match could not simply be explained by the lab's prominent involvement in the federal investigation, notes Randall Larsen, a retired Air Force colonel and a senior associate at the Center for Biosecurity, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center...