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"Forensic" computers depart Twin Cities for tsunami-ravaged countries
by Jeff Horwich, Minnesota Public Radio
January 5, 2005

Each IBM laptop ships with a fingerprint scanner (left) and digital camera to help document the identity of unidentified bodies. (MPR Photo/Jeff Horwich)

This week President Bush asked former Presidents Clinton and Bush Sr. to marshall donations from the private sector for countries affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami. Many such donations are already on the way, including more than $2 million-worth of computers and digital cameras now in transit from Eagan to Bangkok, Thailand. The electronics will help identify the dead -- and perhaps reunite the living.

Eagan, Minn. — In a warehouse just outside St. Paul, volunteers from at least four different companies spent Tuesday morning assembling, testing, and applying the final packing tape to 1,000 computer kits. The components all arrived here by express shipping the day before -- donated by companies in Indiana, North Carolina, California and Minnesota.

Brian Anderson is president of Anderson Cargo, which owns this warehouse. He explains the kits.

"(There's an) IBM laptop, obviously, and then we have a scanner by Digital Persona, and that is a fingerprint recognition piece. And then we have a Logitech web camera. And then the software, which is designed by Laser Data Command. They are the ones that will process it and put it all together," Anderson says.

On the ground in southeast Asia, the kits will work like this: Relief workers take the computers wherever the bodies of unidentified victims have been collected. A digital picture, fingerprint, and other vital information about a body is compressed into a single bar code, then uploaded to a central online database. There, it can be catalogued by authorities and accessed by family members searching for the missing.

The idea came from within IBM, inspired by the difficulty of coping with tens of thousands of unknown bodies. Officials in countries struck by the tsunami say morgues have been overwhelmed by people searching for loved ones.

These computer kits will make remote identification possible. By doing so, they are also likely to hasten burial -- a concern for both cultural and public health reasons.

Northwest Airlines has donated its cargo service to get the pallets of computers to Thailand.

IBM spokeswoman Lorie Luedke says her company will help distribute the laptops once they arrive, probably on Saturday.

"These ThinkPads are being sent over to Bangkok, Thailand, to an IBM facility -- where our crisis response team at that facility is working with the government in deploying the technology," Luedke says.

The companies involved hope the kits will exceed their initial, morbid assignment. Paul Lepore leans over the last row of laptops getting ready to leave the warehouse. He flew to St. Paul from Florida to install donated software from his company, VectorMAX.

"This software that we're installing is VectorMAX software which will allow video conferencing -- two-way video communications -- from laptop to laptop, over any kind of Internet connection," Lepore says. "In this case it's going to be used for reuniting families, putting computers in orphanages and in towns, for people to find others who were separated."

UNICEF says there are tens of thousands of children orphaned by the tsunami, many unclaimed. Other injured adult survivors lie unidentified in hospitals. The hope is that along with cataloging the dead, the computer kits can put at least a few families back together.