The FBI is creating a massive biometric database of Americans drivers license's

Through a Freedom of Information Act request, EPIC obtained a number of agreements between the FBI and state DMVs.

The agreements allow the FBI to use facial recognition to compare subjects of FBI investigations with the millions of license and identification photos retained by participating state DMVs.

EPIC also obtained the Standard Operating Procedure for the program and a Privacy Threshold Analysis that indicated that a Privacy Impact Assessment must be performed, but it is not clear whether one has been completed. EPIC is currently suing the FBI to learn more about its development of a vast biometric identification database.

The Next Generation Identification (NGI) databases is used by the US military to identify insurgents and local police departments (LPDs) to find murderers, bank robbers an drug dealers.
NGI is a part of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) that utilizes “advances in technology, customer requirements, and growing demand for Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) services.”

The FBI has received $1 billion in taxpayer money to collect information on Americans in order to develop an all-encompassing criminal database.

Biometric identifiers have replaced older software to create a “state-of-the-art biometric identification services and provide a flexible framework of core capabilities that will serve as a platform for multimodal functionality.”

House Representative Brett Geymann is concerned that US citizen’s “driver’s license [will] essentially becomes a national ID card.”
http://epic.org/2013/06/fbi-performs-massive-virtual-l.html


Supreme Court upholds privacy of driver records:

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that attorneys cannot use DMV records to solicit clients. In Maracich v. Spears, the Court ruled that solicitation is not a permissible use of state motor vehicle records under the Driver's Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) .

The justices considered the issue in a case where one group of lawyers found a way to file a $200 million class action lawsuit against another group of lawyers that also files class action lawsuits.

It all started in 2006 when a group of drivers had received a solicitation from a attorneys hunting for people who had recently purchased a car in the hopes of enticing them to join a class action lawsuit against automobile dealers. These attorneys received the names, addresses and telephone numbers of 34,000 drivers, along with information on their automobiles and when and where they purchased them from the South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).

Ordinarily, the federal DPPA prohibits the disclosure of personal information from motor vehicle records, unless it is for law enforcement or public safety purposes. The law does have an additional exemption for "investigation in anticipation of litigation." Lawyers for drivers who received the letters sued on the belief that this exemption did not apply because the letters were advertisements of the sort prohibited in another section of the statute (and because they stood to share in a massive judgment of up to $2500 per violation). The high court justices agreed in a 5-4 decision.

"As this opinion explains in more detail, the statute itself, in (b)(12), treats bulk solicitation absent consent as a discrete act that the statute prohibits," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority. "And the limited examples of permissible litigation purposes provided in (b)(4) are distinct from the ordinary commercial purpose of solicitation."

The majority argued that the attorneys were acting not as officers of the court but as a commercial enterprise when sending out the advertisements. As such, they were soliciting new business, not litigating.

"Here, as will be the case for most solicitations, the attorneys acted without court authorization or supervision and cast a wide net, sending letters to over 30,000 car purchasers to let them know the attorneys' names and the attorneys' interest in performing legal services for them," Kennedy wrote.

The majority also noted that the litigation exemption allows disclosure of Social Security numbers and medical history information that is highly sensitive and not appropriate for use in a solicitation without undermining the privacy protection Congress intended with the statute.

"Petitioners and other state residents have no real choice but to disclose their personal information to the state DMV, including highly restricted personal information," Kennedy wrote. "The use of that information by private actors to send direct commercial solicitations without the license holder's consent is a substantial intrusion on the individual privacy the act protects." 

State DMV records contain a huge amount of sensitive personal information, including Social Security Numbers and medical information. EPIC filed a "friend of the court" brief discussing the wide range of personal information contained in DMV records and the risks of identity theft.
http://epic.org/2013/06/supreme-court-upholds-privacy-.html
http://thenewspaper.com/news/41/4130.asp

FBI delves into DMV photos in search for fugitives:

http://publicintelligence.net/fbi-delves-into-dmv-photos-in-search-for-fugitives/