Say hello to the FBI's national facial recognition systemIf you've ever been arrested in the United ...

1. Say hello to the FBI's national facial recognition system
Say hello to the FBI's national facial recognition system
If you've ever been arrested in the United States, chances are strong that your fingerprints and
criminal history are floating around in the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification
System. It's apparently pretty good at what it does - it can sift through some 70 million subjects in
search of a particular fingerprint in as little as half an hour - but it's just not enough for the boys in
blue. Thankfully for them (and maybe unfortunately for us), the FBI just announced that its sequel,
the unimaginatively named Next Generation Identification system, is now "fully operational" some
three years after the rollout began.
The NGI is meant to eventually replace the existing IAFIS system, but there's much more to it than
that. New features like Rap Back essentially provide notifications when people in "positions of trust"
like bank tellers and teachers break the law so whatever authorities they hold might be upheld or
revoked. And then we've got the Interstate Photo System, a tool that allows law enforcement to
search for photos "associated with criminal identities" -- sounds like a useful enough tool, but
privacy advocates are a little uneasy for a whole host of reasons.
Take the very origin of those images: you can expect your mugshot to be in there, but if you apply
for a job that requires your fingerprints or some sort of background check, you may need to submit a
photo that could wind up in the NGI. There's a big question about accuracy, too: the NGI will return
a ranked list of candidates for a facial search, but the Bureau says "the candidate will be returned in
the top 50 candidates" 85 percent of the time if the perp is actually in the list at all. What happens if
that list doesn't actually contain the right person? No one's entirely sure, and that's a little
worrisome.

2. Via: The Verge
Source: FBI
More Coverage: Electronic Frontier Foundation
Tags: facial recognition, facialrecognition, fbi, ips, ngi, security, surveillance
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