The FBI, Technology, and Privacy

The accelerated growth of technological advancements in recent years has made it possible for governments–and individuals–to spy on fellow citizens to a degree unprecedented in history. This rate of development of new technologies has often outstripped our understanding of the implications of what these data collection and surveillance capabilities mean for the future of our privacy. The rate of technological advancements has also often outstripped our laws regulating their use.

Recently the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reported on another such advancement that needs to be aired more thoroughly in the public forum. In the EFF’s article, “FBI Ramps Up Next Generation ID Roll-Out – Will You End Up in the Database?” They report that NextGov.com had announced that the FBI would soon be rolling out its Next Generation Identification (NGI) facial recognition service.

According to the EFF, “Once the NGI is fully deployed and once each of its approximately 100 million records also includes photographs, it will become trivially easy to find and track Americans.” Here are some bullet points I’ve taken from the article:

• the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) is already the largest biometric database in the world…includes 70 million subjects in the criminal master file and more that 31 million civil fingerprints
• The NGI will result in a massive expansion of government data collection for both criminal and noncriminal purposes.
• when NGI merges photographs and other biometric identifiers to be linked to each of those records…it will have an unprecedented impact on Americans’ privacy interests
• NGI will allow unlimited submission of photos and types of photos
• The biggest change in NGI will be the addition of noncriminal photos
• Commercial sites like Facebook might also be absorbed into the NGI…though prohibited by current law, the FBI is not allowed to collect information from “commercial data aggregators” HOWEVER…the “FBI’s 2008 Privacy Impact Assessment” acknowledges that this information could be collected and added to the database by other NGI users like state and local law enforcement agencies.
• Additionally, the FBI’s 2010 Facial Recognition Initiatives Presentation  notes that it a goal of the NGI to “Identify subjects in public data-sets.”
• The combined number of records in the IAFIS database covers close to 1/3 of the population of the United States.

The EFF article is information rich, with numerous links to important documents, articles, and web sites. It’s a good place to start learning about a troublesome aspect of the future of our privacy.

| Category: etcetera |