The FBI certainly has their fair share of methods to track down people whom they deem to be worth tracking, either for security reasons or reasons that are known to them alone. In fact, the FBI has plans to amass up to 52 million photos in its NGI Face Recognition Database by 2015 – which is a scary thought, since that would make up one sixths of the U.S. population already. Give them another five years, and perhaps the entire nation will be part of their Face Recognition database.
While the FBI’s massive biometric database might contain records on as many as one third of the U.S. population, it is the facial recognition aspect of this database which raises questions of privacy at the ilk. FBI’s legacy fingerprint database is certainly augmented with other kinds of biometric data, ranging from palm prints and iris scans. All of these data will be linked to personal and biographic data like one’ name, home address, ID number, immigration status, age, and race, among others.
The database has the ability to process 55,000 direct photo enrollments each day, in addition to conducting tens of thousands of searches every single day. Do bear in mind that non-criminal face images too, will be mixed alongside criminal face images in this database. Basically, as long as you apply for a job that requires fingerprinting or a background check, you can be sure that your prints will be sent to and stored by the FBI in its civil print database, in addition your face print and fingerprints, too, will now be “harvested”.
Filed in . Read more about Science.