FBI To Spend $1B Expanding Fingerprint Database

mytrip and other readers alerted us to news that the FBI is about to announce the awarding of a $1B, 10-year contract to expand its fingerprint database to incorporate other biometrics — palm prints, iris scans, scars, tattoos, possibly facial shape — "Whatever the biometric that comes down the road, we need to be able to plug that in and play," an FBI spokesman is quoted. Barry Steinhardt of the ACLU sounded the cautionary note: "This had started out being a program to track or identify criminals. Now we're talking about large swaths of the population — workers, volunteers in youth programs. Eventually, it's going to be everybody."

biometrics is the future

[noremorse10]

The FBI will be awarding the 10 year, 1 billion dollar contract in the next few days to one of the large system integrators: IBM, Lockheed or Northrop. But within the next 6 months the biometric portion will be awarded for running the fingerprint database. The favorite is Cogent Systems (COGT) a leader in the biometric space. They run the biometric database for the US_VISIT program and other large scale fingerprint biometric identification systems around the world. See video about them http://www.cogentsystems.com/video.asp [cogentsystems.com]

Re:Is it useful?

[ad454]

Here in Japan, if you are not a Japanese citizen, then you will be fingerprinted when you enter immigration at any port of entry.

Even if you try to refuse and try to leave immigration to depart Japan, the Japanese authorities will forceable fingerprint you, and then likely throw you in jail before deporting you. The Japanese authorities will also throw you in jail if you do anything with your fingerprints, such as dyes, acid, or pineapple juice, or tamper with the fingerprint readers. Unless all of your finger tips are heavily and permanently scarred, you will be fingerprinted and incarcerated until they grow back. So your choice is either to submit willingly and be fingerprinted or object and suffer incarceration (including beatings/torture by authorities) and still be fingerprinted.

The really bad thing here, is that the corrupt Japanese government awarded the contract to collect the "foreigner" biometric data to the corrupt criminal organization Accenture (renamed Arthur Andersen) which did the falsified books for Enron and Worldcom. Accenture won the bid to collect the data for only (JPY)$100,000, approximately (USD)$900. You can bet that the Accenture paid the Japanese government a lot of money under the table in order to resell the biometric data to interested parties.

I would not be surprised if US authorities, and other countries as well, will do the same thing to force their own citizens as well as foreigners, to submit to fingerprinting and other biometric collection. And that sooner or later, you will not be able to opt out. I wonder if Accenture is also maintaining the new FBI biometric database.

Welcome to the new world order.

Re:If you've done nothing wrong

[JasterBobaMereel]

Because of course fingerprinting always matches 100% and is utterly reliable and no-one has the same fingerprints ?

Fingerprint identification is a human (computer assisted) task that people learn how to do, get better at but are never 100% accurate at (especially in marginal cases) The fingerprints used are quite often partial and the chance of error can be magnified greatly ...

DNA "fingerprinting" however is not normally subject to human error but is still quoted (correctly) as error value (e.g. the chance of two people matching this DNA sample is 1:10000000)

If you use fingerprints on suspects it works fairly reliably (there are mistakes made) if you trawl a database to find suspects the errors will increase exponentially

Most DNA fingerprints are quoted as 1 in million to 1 in billion ... which means it will match 6-7 people on earth ...?

Re:biometrics is the future

[smchris]

You'd think they'd go with IBM. Their track record supporting Hitler was so impressive:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/jun2001/ibm-j27.shtml [wsws.org]

But will they use linux?

Re:Is it useful?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell? I've been to Japan on multiple occasions, I even lived there, and I have never been fingerprinted. Beatings? Torture? Can somebody else maybe confirm this or are you just, you know, talking crap?

They do indeed treat Chinese immigrants different from others, but even then.. I doubt it's that bad. But hey, maybe somebody with actual experience in the matter can say something that actually matters.

MISINFORMATION

[v(*_*)vvvv]

To say Accenture is a corrupt criminal organization is a little out of line. They are a multi-billion dollar international consulting agency, not the mob or Yakuza (not to say they don't have connections, but then, when you're that big who doesn't). And I don't think Accenture has any part in the FBI biometric database.

Although I am always cynical about Wikipedia entries and who really edits them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture [wikipedia.org]

Also, the US already fingerprints all incoming foreigners. Japan only adopted it recently because of US pressure. I am pretty sure the Japanese government follows the US constitution better than the US right now.

I was fingerprinted in 2nd grade

[BigHungryJoe]

When I was in elementary school, the local police came to school one day to fingerprint all of us "in case we ever got kidnapped" (this would have been around 1984 or so - I remember the TV movie "Adam" had recently come out so parents were in an uproar about us getting abducted).

Not realizing how ridiculous this was at the time or the significance of it, I allowed myself to be inked and fingerprinted.

What are the odds that those fingerprints have made their way into the FBI database?

DNA db != coding DNA

[DrYak]

all-inclusive DNA/ID database, it will be inevitable before someone gets the brilliant notion that no one owns their DNA, but borrows it from society's gene pool. This will bring about well-intentioned (or not) havoc in who decides what DNA is "beneficial" or better off culled?

Currently a DNA database can only contain non-coding DNA. For 2 reasons :

1. Practical reasons. Most of the genes coding for something are of critical importance. If a mutation goes wrong, the individual dies or most likely doesn't even manage to reach birth in the first place. Thus these genes sports very few mutation and are very well conserved between individual (and even between species. We have practically almost the sames genes as chimp, and share a lot in common with fruit flies. All these shape differences are mainly due to the last few couple of genes that aren't conserved).
   A DNA/ID database is mainly used to distinguish between individuals. Thus one would prefer DNA sequence that vary a lot. Non-coding portion of the DNA may contain a lot more variations between individual.
2. Ethical point of view. Despite what you may be afraid of, laws and medical ethics consider the coding DNA to be pretty much the property of the individual. Analysing DNA provides medical information. Medical information cannot be shared and cannot be obtained without the patient consent. If someone looked at coding DNA, he could end up obtaining valuable medical information about that individual (See Craig Venter's personnal genome [wikipedia.org]). As the suspect isn't generally on a crime scene, he's not available to give his consent that his medical data gets analyzed. The lab staff that processes the blood sample from the crime scene doesn't have the right to analyse coding sequence, otherwise their license would be revoked on ground of obtain and divulging medical information without the patient's consent.
   A lab can give global information about the sample that are available without DNA analysis (male vs. female, human vs. other). A lab can analyse non-coding DNA for markers, which can subsequently be used to match other samples in a DB (marker x, y, z present, possible sibling of sample containing x, z and w). A lab CANNOT analyse for coding DNA (Suspect has blue eyes, is short, caucasian ethnic group, has a cardiac malformation and a slight probability for psychosis).

Of course, your government could end up changing its laws and make it mandatory to extract and store phenotypic information from coding genes. With the speed of computing power increase, by 50 years from now, it would probably be possible to have a database storing full genomes of individuals, with laws requiring that no consent is needed to extract that information and that any doctor refusing to collaborate on ethics and Hippocratic oath's ground will immediately lose his/her license.