FBI Prepares Vast Database of Biometrics

MacRonin sends us to the Washington Post for a story about the FBI's plans for a large biometric identification database. The Post also has a chart detailing the characteristics of the different methods of identification. We discussed the ethics of a similar situation a few months ago. Quoting the Post: "Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law."

Comments

Sigh

[Bayoudegradeable]

I can't get this ending line out of my head... "He loved Big Brother."

Re:Sigh

[jacquesm]

I think the FBI simply wants a bigger haystack :)

It really amazes me how everybody seems to think that more information is key, whereas I think that *better* information is key. Datamining really is an advanced way of searching for the needle in that haystack and if you throw tons of non-relevant data in there you've just made your job that much harder. The big trick is to try to increase the quality of the data without missing important bits. Trawling all the grandmothers credit card transactions is not going to increase the S/N ratio.

Re:Sigh

[fyngyrz]

From the story:

The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.

Orwell was an optimist. The slide into complete loss of privacy, personal liberties, and any chance at atonement for making mistakes, intentional or otherwise, is far more insidious then he ever dreamed — and it is going to be far more complete than he imagined. Our country stands for nothing; we are powerless to change anything; the politicians and their lapdog agencies run rampant. I am ashamed.

From your post:

if you throw tons of non-relevant data in there you've just made your job that much harder.

The data is relevant, don't kid yourself. Your retina print, fingerprints, blood type, genetic details... what tracking these things in this way really means is a profound hardening of classes; felons will always be felons, that time you got caught throwing toilet paper on the courthouse will never, ever come off your record, your political affiliations in college will always, always constrain your future job opportunities and more.

A society that cannot forgive is a society that is lost, as far as I am concerned. A society that marks people specifically so that it can class them has reached the approximate social level of pond scum. There is little - if any - difference between the stars the Jews were forced to wear and a database that marks an individual for an infraction they have long ago atoned for. If the thesis is that one can never atone for an error, mis-step or intentional antisocial act, then it is flawed to begin with.

None of which will stop, or even slow down, this trend. When every liberty is up for trading in return for a claim of improved security, when every freedom is deemed too risky to the body politic, when every over-stated threat causes the public to whimper and keep their children locked inside, the Rubicon has well and truly been crossed. Felons! Terrorists! Pedophiles! Pornography! Drugs! None of these "threats" do a fraction of the damage as the "solutions" America has come to, and is working towards.

Orwell was indeed an optimist.

Re:Sigh

[BornAgainSlakr]

Please stop with the Ron Paul crap. The only thing I can figure about the Ron Paul fascination is that he is different and that is how far the bar has been lowered. He is not John Jackson or Jack Johnson (to quote Futurama), so people are flocking to him. The problem is, he is a die hard libertarian and naive to boot. Someone who believes that the government should be sold off in a fire sale because corporations with a profit-motive can provide those services cheaper and better is naive at best. Not that there are not instances where that is true, but just saying, as he as said on national TV, that profit-motive fixes everything is ridiculous. Now, surely he would not be able to enact even a mere fraction of his beliefs, but just having another four years with someone as naive as Bush scares me.

Besides, I am not sure why anyone believes that there is a candidate that can bring about real change. Real change needs to start with things like amending the Constitution to put term limits on Congress, or all elected officials for that matter. Power corrupts always, and those people have to be rotated out before we will see change. The problem there is: good luck getting Congress to start the ball rolling on that one.

This is disturbing

[HangingChad]

The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.

You can get arrested for anything these days and now the FBI is going to become your employers watchdog? I've seen some dickish, big brother behavior since 9-11 but this tops the suck pyramid.

Re:This is disturbing

[iknownuttin]

Yeah, and if you're arrested by mistake or acquitted after trial, no one will care. They'll just see some entry in the FBIs database and assume the worst. I think there should be some way that someone who's been falsely accused to get some compensation for not being able to work ever again. Let's face it, if you have any sort of criminal record - true or false - you can never get a job, loan, etc... your life is in effect ruined. And this database will make that much easier for it to be done.

Re:This is disturbing

[ScrewMaster]

The thing is, this is less about national security than it is about risk avoidance.

Companies that do business with people, and organizations that hire people, wish to avoid risk. In principle, this is just an extension of the way the American credit system works. There, your entire financial history is available to anyone that wants to decide if you can be trusted. It used to be, the deadbeat customer was a normal cost of doing business. In today's world, companies large and small have the credit bureaus to track us for them. However, at least there if you keep your nose clean and wait enough years, your past misdeeds will no longer haunt you. Expect that limit to be removed at some point, because obviously people that can't handle money well are threats to national security.

Make no mistake, the underlying sponsors of this unConstitutional boloney are corporate. From the extension of copyrights to longer credit histories to biometric tracking, this is all about the corporate world wanting to minimize its exposure to risk. The fact that it plays right into the hands of certain power hungry politicians and their appointed/unelected officials is just unfortunate for us.

where's my troll mod?

[circletimessquare]

you will find that the majority of americans won't be disturbed by this. there are some who will use this as proof that most americans are morons. as if insulting the average citizen is supposed to win you any points in the battle against big/ intrusive government, oh great genius?

no, the average american won't care, because the average american, when given news like this, doesn't see a big downside to this. when told the downside to this as displayed here in some posts, they will think the average slashdot poster has been watching too many paranoid hollywood movies

now give my troll mod for not toeing the party line here

yawn

Re:Fingerprint retention

[fyngyrz]

The FBI already retains fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks, at least for companies registered with the SEC.

That doesn't make it right.

Re:He Loved Big Brother

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully you're trolling, but sadly a lot of people actually believe that.

What they fail to comprehend is that the "criminal" element is just as evenly dispersed among government jobs as among the rest of society. When you create a huge power differential between those holding certain government jobs and the rest of us, you are empowering the criminals on that side as well as the good people on that side.

This is what happens when you try to pre-assign people "goodness" ratings based on what job they hold. You end up with a subset of vastly overpowered criminals (granted power by the laws themselves) and no net decrease in what we commonly regard as criminal behavior (killing, theft, fraud, etc.).

The only sane way to assign arbitrary power to law enforcers is to maintain constant oversight of them, in a circular fashion -- the police watch the citizens, the citizens watch a police oversight body, and the police oversight body watches the police. That we neglect to do this is a serious mistake, and it results in a police force that behaves like it can get away with anything ethical or unethical (and often does).

Re:What ARE the Alternatives?

[snl2587]

Other countries don't have terrorist problems (yet), and so they don't have to perform intrusive procedures.

Under what rock have you been living?

I am not convinced that we are any less safe now then we were a decade or so ago, just much more paranoid. It really says something when a nation of immigrants is deceived into thinking they need to bar foreigners.

Re:U.S.And them

[cooley]

It's just that, well, we have a fairly large population of over-religious farmers who tend to vote for all the wrong people. That's funny, every demographic I've ever seen says that between 1 and 2 percent of the US population either lives on a farm or considers farming their occupation. One to two percent of the population has very little sway over the outcome of our national elections.

You go ahead and keep telling yourself that "it's some farmer in the midwest" screwing it all up, though; especially the next time you drive through Florida.

Right now on the US National political scene, it would seem that the default "heir" to the Bush/Cheney ideology of fear is Rudolph Giuliani. What city was he mayor of, again? Are there a lot of farmers living in Manhattan?

Oh wait, I must have been confused; it's Illinois where a lot of farmers live, and their state has given us Senator Obama in the Presidential contender line-up.

Please, if you're going to generalize about the American population, try to generalize in a way that makes sense. Here you're telling our foreign friend "hey look, we Americans are cooler than we might appear", yet then you generalize about "farmers". Nice.

Sad but true

[Nursie]

The average person will simply think the government is doing more to look out for *them*.

A few false arrests and multi-year imprisonments because of a software bug or flaw in the biometric database? Just the price to be paid for security.

That particular way of thinking sickens me, but it's quite prevalent. Many people (my mother included) would far rather see 10 innocents imprisoned than one guilty man go free. Because they're terrorists or something.

I try to explain that I know have Iranian family on my father's side and next time it could be me that's falsely accused of associating with and aiding people (incorrectly) thought to be terrorists. But that doesn't seem to get through, that there could ever be a mistake. Somewhere in the back of a lot of folks minds there's this strong conviction that mistakes like that just don't happen, despite multiple high profile examples to the contrary, and even if they do, it doesn't matter because they don't think it can happen to them. Because why would it? I'm a good person, why would the government arrest me?

At that point I usually give up trying to argue and go back to mourning the state of the world. No, it doesn't win me any points, realising that the average person is about as questioning of authority as a faithful puppy, it is unfortunately the true state of the world though.

Re:He Loved Big Brother

[Anonymous Coward]

What they fail to comprehend is that the "criminal" element is just as evenly dispersed among government jobs as among the rest of society.

As a member of the general public, I take umbrage with that statement. I'm convinced that there is a far greater representation of the criminal element in modern government (at least, in "elected" and appointed office) than in the rest of society. The same can be said of the business executive level.

When you create a huge power differential between those holding certain government jobs and the rest of us, you are empowering the criminals on that side

Exactly. And that is what I think attracts people with criminal tendencies to government office and to business executive. The power and potential rewards are so great as to act like a magnet to people with criminal tendencies.