FBI's Next-Gen ID Databank to Store Face Scans

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Lockheed Martin is building a massive digital warehouse of criminal information, set to bring facial recognition and eye scans to local law enforcement within 10 years. The FBI may use biometric technology to bolster mug shots, fingerprints and DNA to catch crooks—but privacy advocates say there's reason for law-abiding citizens to worry.

Ten years ago, if a police department wanted to run a check on a suspect's fingerprints, someone had to mail an ink-splotched card to the FBI. The agency would then check it by hand against millions of other index cards, and it could take as long as two months for a match to return. Today, the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System processes around 150,000 sets of prints per day and can respond to a request in as little as 15 minutes.

But a decade from now, fingerprints could be as quaint as the index cards on which they were once stored. The FBI's Next Generation Identification (NGI) system, which could cost as much as $1 billion over its 10-year life cycle, will create an unprecedented database of biometric markers, such as facial images and iris scans. For criminal investigators, NGI could be as useful as DNA some day—a distinctive scar or a lopsided jaw line could mean the difference between a cold case and closed one. And for privacy watchdogs, it's a duel threat—seen as a step toward a police state, and a gold mine of personal data waiting to be plundered by cybercriminals.

For now, NGI is barely more than a concept. Lockheed Martin was awarded a multiyear contract in February to develop the system, and the company is currently conducting a trade study to determine what sort of biometric technologies should be incorporated into it. Lockheed isn't building the various scanners that police will be using to collect data, but rather is determining which ones will be compatible. “The trade study we're doing is for the matching algorithm—the guts of NGI,” says Barbara Humpton, the company's project manager for NGI. “Lockheed does not build [data] capture devices or matching algorithms, per se. And capture devices are actually outside of the bounds of NGI. Those would be managed by individual agencies. NGI is about setting up a database and standards—the format for how things come into the system.”

NGI will involve some hardware, such as a massive amount of data storage for the various high-resolution images of faces or irises that could become part of the system. Like the FBI's current fingerprint system, NGI will be software-based, providing data to whichever agency or police department has the compatible biometric collection gear. Until Lockheed's trade study is finished, there's no telling which particular devices will be folded into the project. And neither Lockheed nor the FBI will discuss the anticipated amount of storage, or other hard numbers, such as how fast the system could return results.

The FBI has confirmed that, along with adding palm prints to its existing “ten-print” records, the bureau will have to expand its photo repository. “That could be the basis for our facial recognition,” says Thomas Bush, assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division. “And it's not a true biometric [marker], but scars and tattoos, we want to be able to search those nationwide.” Some of that information could come from prisons, where scar and tattoo databases have become increasingly common. But for accurate facial recognition, mug shots aren't the best source of data. Agencies would likely have to start taking photos of suspects from more angles, and at relatively high resolutions.