Beyond Fingerprints: FBI, Lockheed Build Billion-Dollar ID System

Saturday, February 21, 2009

The current identification system used by the federal government, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, is ten years old and out of date. The FBI, with primary contractor Lockheed Martin, is developing, for $1 billion, its replacement, the Next Generation Identification (NGI) program. The new system with go beyond fingerprints to include palm prints, voice recognition, iris recognition, face recognition and DNA. It will also allow searches for photographs of scars, marks and tattoos. According to the FBI, the time for urgent criminal fingerprint searches will be reduced from 2 hours to 10 minutes, using faster access to the Repository of Individuals of Special Concern, which includes terror suspects, more than 600,000 wanted persons and more than 475,000 sex offenders. Information will be shared with state and local law enforcement. Lockheed Martin is also the lead contractor for the Transportation Worker Identification Credential program, used by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to vet port workers. Be warned: if you visit the FBI website, it will track your IP address, your operating system, the pages you visit and the website you visited before going to the FBI website.

 
Next Generation Identification (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
FBI Biometric Center of Excellence (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
How the FBI is Spending $1 Billion (by Olesia Plokhii, OhMyGov!)
FBI Prepares Vast Database of Biometrics (by Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post)

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