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FBI Prepares Vast
Database Of Biometrics
$1 Billion Project to Include Images of Irises and Faces
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
12/22/07 "Washington
Post" - -- -CLARKSBURG, W. Va. --
The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's
largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics,
a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities
to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.
Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are
already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure
basement here. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year
contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of
biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law
enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on
iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the
unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify
criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request
by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone
criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if
employees have brushes with the law.
"Bigger. Faster. Better. That's the bottom line," said Thomas E.
Bush III, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice
Information Services Division, which operates the database from
its headquarters in the Appalachian foothills.
The increasing use of biometrics for identification is raising
questions about the ability of Americans to avoid unwanted
scrutiny. It is drawing criticism from those who worry that
people's bodies will become de facto national identification
cards. Critics say that such government initiatives should not
proceed without proof that the technology really can pick a
criminal out of a crowd.
The use of biometric data is increasing throughout the
government. For the past two years, the Defense Department has
been storing in a database images of fingerprints, irises and
faces of more than 1.5 million Iraqi and Afghan detainees, Iraqi
citizens and foreigners who need access to U.S. military bases.
The Pentagon also collects DNA samples from some Iraqi
detainees, which are stored separately.
The Department of Homeland Security has been using iris scans at
some airports to verify the identity of travelers who have
passed background checks and who want to move through lines
quickly. The department is also looking to apply iris- and
face-recognition techniques to other programs. The DHS already
has a database of millions of sets of fingerprints, which
includes records collected from U.S. and foreign travelers
stopped at borders for criminal violations, from U.S. citizens
adopting children overseas, and from visa applicants abroad.
There could be multiple records of one person's prints.
"It's going to be an essential component of tracking," said
Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Project
of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It's enabling the Always
On Surveillance Society."
If successful, the system planned by the FBI, called Next
Generation Identification, will collect a wide variety of
biometric information in one place for identification and
forensic purposes.
In an underground facility the size of two football fields, a
request reaches an FBI server every second from somewhere in the
United States or Canada, comparing a set of digital fingerprints
against the FBI's database of 55 million sets of electronic
fingerprints. A possible match is made -- or ruled out--as many
as 100,000 times a day.
Soon, the server at CJIS headquarters will also compare palm
prints and, eventually, iris images and face-shape data such as
the shape of an earlobe. If all goes as planned, a police
officer making a traffic stop or a border agent at an airport
could run a 10-fingerprint check on a suspect and within seconds
know if the person is on a database of the most wanted criminals
and terrorists. An analyst could take palm prints lifted from a
crime scene and run them against the expanded database.
Intelligence agents could exchange biometric information
worldwide.
More than 55 percent of the search requests now are made for
background checks on civilians in sensitive positions in the
federal government, and jobs that involve children and the
elderly, Bush said. Currently those prints are destroyed or
returned when the checks are completed. But the FBI is planning
a "rap-back" service, under which employers could ask the FBI to
keep employees' fingerprints in the database, subject to state
privacy laws, so that if that employees are ever arrested or
charged with a crime, the employers would be notified.
Advocates say bringing together information from a wide variety
of sources and making it available to multiple agencies
increases the chances to catch criminals. The Pentagon has
already matched several Iraqi suspects against the FBI's
criminal fingerprint database. The FBI intends to make both
criminal and civilian data available to authorized users,
officials said. There are 900,000 federal, state and local law
enforcement officers who can query the fingerprint database
today, they said.
The FBI's biometric database, which includes criminal history
records, communicates with the Terrorist Screening Center's
database of suspects and the National Crime Information Center
database, which is the FBI's master criminal database of felons,
fugitives and terrorism suspects.
The FBI is building its system according to standards shared by
Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
At the West Virginia University Center for Identification
Technology Research (CITeR), 45 minutes north of the FBI's
biometric facility in Clarksburg, researchers are working on
capturing images of people's irises at distances of up to 15
feet, and of faces from as far away as 200 yards. Soon, those
researchers will do biometric research for the FBI.
Covert iris- and face-image capture is several years away, but
it is of great interest to government agencies.
Think of a Navy ship approaching a foreign vessel, said Bojan
Cukic, CITeR's co-director. "It would help to know before you go
on board whether the people on that ship that you can image from
a distance, whether they are foreign warfighters, and run them
against a database of known or suspected terrorists," he said.
Skeptics say that such projects are proceeding before there is
evidence that they reliably match suspects against a huge
database.
In the world's first large-scale, scientific study on how well
face recognition works in a crowd, the German government this
year found that the technology, while promising, was not yet
effective enough to allow its use by police. The study was
conducted from October 2006 through January at a train station
in Mainz, Germany, which draws 23,000 passengers daily. The
study found that the technology was able to match travelers'
faces against a database of volunteers more than 60 percent of
the time during the day, when the lighting was best. But the
rate fell to 10 to 20 percent at night.
To achieve those rates, the German police agency said it would
tolerate a false positive rate of 0.1 percent, or the erroneous
identification of 23 people a day. In real life, those 23 people
would be subjected to further screening measures, the report
said.
Accuracy improves as techniques are combined, said Kimberly Del
Greco, the FBI's biometric services section chief. The Next
Generation database is intended to "fuse" fingerprint, face,
iris and palm matching capabilities by 2013, she said.
To safeguard privacy, audit trails are kept on everyone who has
access to a record in the fingerprint database, Del Greco said.
People may request copies of their records, and the FBI audits
all agencies that have access to the database every three years,
she said.
"We have very stringent laws that control who can go in there
and to secure the data," Bush said.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy
Information Center, said the ability to share data across
systems is problematic. "You're giving the federal government
access to an extraordinary amount of information linked to
biometric identifiers that is becoming increasingly inaccurate,"
he said.
In 2004, the Electronic Privacy Information Center objected to
the FBI's exemption of the National Crime Information Center
database from the Privacy Act requirement that records be
accurate. The group noted that the Bureau of Justice Statistics
in 2001 found that information in the system was "not fully
reliable" and that files "may be incomplete or inaccurate." FBI
officials justified that exemption by claiming that in law
enforcement data collection, "it is impossible to determine in
advance what information is accurate, relevant, timely and
complete."
Privacy advocates worry about the ability of people to correct
false information. "Unlike say, a credit card number, biometric
data is forever," said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley technology
forecaster. He said he feared that the FBI, whose computer
technology record has been marred by expensive failures, could
not guarantee the data's security. "If someone steals and spoofs
your iris image, you can't just get a new eyeball," Saffo said.
In the future, said CITeR director Lawrence A. Hornak, devices
will be able to "recognize us and adapt to us."
"The long-term goal," Hornak said, is "ubiquitous use" of
biometrics. A traveler may walk down an airport corridor and
allow his face and iris images to be captured without ever
stepping up to a kiosk and looking into a camera, he said.
"That's the key," he said. "You've chosen it. You have chosen to
say, 'Yeah, I want this place to recognize me.' "
Staff researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.
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