Maritime / Ports

Water transportation has been an essential component of the world economy for centuries. Trillions of dollars of raw and finished goods are transported each year around the world through open waterways. Due to their essential nature, countries have worked hard at keeping these waterways easily accessible.

Due to the relatively easy accessibility of the waterways, they also have become a potential conduit for conducting terrorist activity.


The United States has more than 95,000 miles of shoreline around it, more than 290,000 square miles of water and over 70 million recreational boats alone in its territorial space. The United States Coast Guard has been mandated to protect the country from potentially dangerous terrorist-related activity and given the funding and authority to enforce laws designed to protect the waterways and port infrastructure from problematic activity.

Increasing Regulatory Requirements for Ports and Vessels

U.S. security regulations that are driving demand for identity management solutions that incorporate biometrics include:

• The Maritime Security Act of 2002
• HSPD-12 and HSPD-24
• The U.S. Transportation Workers Identification Credential (TWIC) program, which requires a secure, standardized biometric credential
• HAZPRINT, which performs fingerprint-based biometric criminal history checks for all commercial drivers transporting hazardous materials
• US-VISIT Program (U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology), the automated entry/exit tracking program requiring foreigners to provide fingerprints and pictures when entering the U.S.
  

MaxID Corp and the Maritime Industry / Ports

The MaxID identity management solutions overcome the flexibility challenges faced by tethered computing systems that require costly transportation, infrastructure or human management costs. Our solutions converge, in a single computing device, compliance-driven technologies that ensure secure access to physical assets, applications and information by employees, customers and partners. We incorporate our proprietary software and intellectual property with leading biometrics technologies from our partners, including HID Global, Corestreet, Codebench, Lumidigm and others, into rugged form factors that enable the applications and features our customers demand. Our products help organizations protect assets, manage risk, improve visibility and productivity, and reduce cost and complexity.

Coast Guard Interdiction of High Interest Vessels (HIVs)

The United States Coast Guard was recently asked to interdict incoming LNG tankers bound for ports in the US to assure that the crew aboard the inbound ship was the same as the one that departed weeks before. Such interdiction required biometric validation of crew members.

As the United States Coast Guard was familiar with the MaxID iDLMaxG (iDL500) multimodal hand-held computer from its use with TWIC enforcement, they approached MaxID Corp for a solution for these biometric interdiction requirements.

MaxID Corp worked closely with the United States Coast Guard and designed software that could draw down biometric data from the Department of State and the US Visit biometric databases and use this data to validate the inbound crew of the HIV (High Interest Vessel). Coast Guard then boarded these inbound LNG tankers and biometrically verified the crew against the filed biometrics on record.

The iDL500 proved once again to be an incredibly flexible, powerful and useful tool for helping secure the waterways and coast line of the US.