Do I Know You? by Pearl Sharrona;

Author:Pearl, Sharrona; [Pearl, Sharrona;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2023-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

At Checkpoint Charlie: The ABCs of Face Fraud Detection Training

The Berlin Wall was built in 1961, creating a physical and tangible separation between East and West Germany in particular, and the East and West in the Global North more broadly. The wall made passage between the two halves of Germany more challenging, but like all borders, it remained porous. The Grenzübergangsstelle Friedrichstraße-Zimmerstraße, known in English as Checkpoint Charlie (figure 5.1), was the only designated and allowable border crossing point for both members of the allied forces and non-German citizens.16 The checkpoint was highly visible and gained considerable cultural traction in film, television, and fictional narratives.17 In its way, Checkpoint Charlie has remained quite famous, now serving as a major tourist destination with many of its artifacts displayed in museums worldwide. Checkpoint Charlie Mauer Museum was founded shortly after the construction of the wall and has been operating since October 19, 1962. The checkpoint was busy, both with legitimate crossings and those seeking to flee to the west or to access loved ones (and cheaper shopping) in the east. As Marieke Drost has chronicled in “Nose Matching at Checkpoint Charlie,” the first three years of the wall saw a huge exodus of East Germans using borrowed passports from West German citizens who resembled them enough to pass the possibly substandard scrutiny of the border guards. So the border guards got tougher, or at least their training did: in 1964, guards staffing the border between East and West Germany fell under the administration of the notorious Stasi, who developed extensive instruction guides and testing mechanisms to improve the detection of identity and passport fraud.18

The Wende Museum in Culver City has an extensive collection of training manuals as part of its Peter Bochmann collection. The manuals include detailed images of faces and side-by-side comparisons of features designed to improve verification techniques and limit the number of people getting through with stolen or borrowed identity documents. Broken down by feature types for eyes, lips, nose, and head shape, profile, nature of facial hair, and the triangle of nose, lips, and chin, these manuals guided guards through specific types of comparisons that highlighted how to categorize features and see if they correspond between person and picture. In Marieke Drost’s evocative framing, this collection of “biometric technology avant la lettre,” took the underlying theories of greatest hits guys like Lombroso and Bertillon and applied it directly to border patrol, producing a small industry of not just material but testing mechanisms, with the ability to perform well on matching tasks now part of the requirements for the job.19 If nothing else, given the challenges in improving matching skills, the presence of the Stasi ensured a more rigorous checking process that would itself eliminate any errors born of lack of close scrutiny. It seemed to work: by 1975, almost no one with a fraudulent passport slipped through the checkpoint.20

Figure 5.1. Checkpoint Charlie, April 8, 2013. Courtesy of Jaipreet Virdi

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