The FBI is creating a vast facial recognition database of at least 12 million Americans.
Recently-released documents show that the FBI has been working since late 2011 with four states—Michigan, Hawaii, Maryland, and possibly Oregon—to ramp up the Next Generation Identification (NGI) Facial Recognition Program. When the program is fully deployed in 2014, the FBI expects its facial recognition database will contain at least 12 million “searchable frontal photos.”
The documents, which the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) obtained from a recent meeting of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Advisory Policy Board,1 shed new light on the FBI’s plans for NGI—the Bureau's massive biometrics database that combines fingerprints, iris scans, palm prints, facial recognition and extensive biographical data collected from over 100 million Americans.
The Advisory Board documents show that FBI's database of facial images will provide search results automatically (the system won't need to rely on a human to check the results before forwarding them to the state or local agency) and that the FBI is developing "Universal Face Workstation software" to allow states that don't have their own "Face/Photo search capabilities" to search through the FBI's images.
After we read through the Advisory Board documents, we quickly sent Open Records requests to several of the states involved in the pilot program. The documents we received from Maryland and Hawaii further flesh out the story. For example, the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Hawaii and the FBI shows that the government is building NGI to “permit photo submissions independent of arrests.” This is a problem because, the FBI has stated it wants to use its facial recognition system to "identify subjects in public datasets” and "conduct automated surveillance at lookout locations" (p.5). This suggests the FBI wants to be able to search and identify people in photos of crowds and in pictures posted on social media sites—even if the people in those photos haven’t been arrested for or even suspected of a crime. The FBI may also want to incorporate those crowd or social media photos into its face recognition database.
And an MOU between Maryland and the FBI will allow Maryland to submit photos in bulk to the database—something that Maryland described in an email as a “photo data dump.” This kind of an agreement could be used in the future to incorporate the same kind of facial identifying information already collected by 32 of 50 state DMVs solely to prevent fraud and identity theft.
The Advisory Board documents contain other concerning information. For example, one document discusses the FBI’s plans to combine civil and criminal biometrics records by giving them a single searchable “master name” or unique identifying number. As we’ve noted, criminal and civil records have always been kept separate in the past. While this may be a function of the differences in how each type of print is collected and stored, it has effectively meant that civil prints—collected for employment verification, for background checks, for federal jobs, and even to become a lawyer in California—have not been automatically searched every time criminal prints are checked against the database. That will all change once FBI implements its unique identity system. Although FBI states that “the criminal and civil files will remain logically separated...[to] ensure that retained civil submissions remain untainted by criminal submissions” it’s hard to see how this is functionally true, given that civil files will be searched at the same time as criminal files.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/07/fbis_facial_recognition_coming_state_near_you