December 24, 2007 - The FBI has spent years and millions of tax payer dollars building a biometric database. The database contains that names and biometric data of criminals, government employees, people who have gone through government background checks for their employers and a terrorism suspect or two. If the FBI gets its way however, its database is about to get a lot bigger. The agencies vision, if it comes to pass, will end privacy as we know it today.

Just imagine a world where the government could scan the retina's of people eyes from a distance of 15 feet or more. Or where the government could scan your face from a distance of 600 feet and identify you in seconds. This is the system that the FBI is attempting to build. And they would like to deploy the system within by 2013.

The data that the FBI wants to store includes names, addresses and SSNs. It also includes personally identifiable characteristics such as scars, retinal scans and facial characteristics. It is likely that as the system progresses in its development, other data will be added to the mix.

The technology to accomplish covert retinal scans, as described above, is several years away according to experts. If it ever becomes a reality, a new black market will erupt overnight in the form of retinal identity theft. This may sound far fetched but as soon as you realize that computer scans of a persons retina are actually stored as number strings, it is easy to understand how such data will become valuable to thieves.

The technology for facial scans already exists... sort of. In a study conducted in Germany at a train station that services 23,000 passengers each day, existing software was able to identify 60% of the passengers that were traveling during the day. At night, due to poor lighting conditions, that rate dropped to as low as 10%. But these statistics are bound to improve quickly.

As previously mentioned, the current database contains information on criminals. It also contains information on terrorism suspects. It is doubtful that the public feels much sympathy toward either of these groups of people. But the database also contains information on employees of private companies who are in the process of going through background checks. Presently, once the government has completed such a check, the data on that employee is purged. The FBI wants to change this.

The FBI's plan is to give employers the option of having the FBI retain the data on any employee that has gone through an FBI background check. The FBI will then notify employers if any of these employees ever becomes involved in a legal incident. This is a tremendous amount of power to be placed in the hands of the government, and it raises a number of legal and ethical questions.

For instance, our constitution guarantees everyone a presumption of innocence until they are found guilty by a jury. Would the FBI be barred from notifying employers about an employee unless the employee was convicted of wrongdoing? If not, then this program should be killed by Congress immediately. Would a warrant be required for the government to conduct a covert retinal scan on someone? If not, there are some very serious privacy issues associated with this practice.

If these issues are not serious enough, then consider the fact that the government has had nothing but problems with data management to date. The Veterans Administration has had numerous data breaches, exposing approximately 25 million people to potential identity theft over the past two years. The IRS and Social Security Administration refuse to tell identity theft victims that their SSN is being used by multiple people under a misguided policy that such notifications would violate the privacy rights of the person committing identity theft. This defies logic.

Now the government wants us to trust them with our personal biometric data. The thought of it should really frighten anyone who is familiar with the government's track record on data accuracy and data protection.

ACCESS is calling on Congress to provide oversight of this FBI program known as Next Generation. It is likely to be fraught with all of the same issues that Secure Flight has had. Congress has refused to allow the TSA to implement Secure Flight because of the privacy issues it creates. A ten point test was created and the law mandated that in order for Secure Flight to be implemented, it would have to pass on all ten points. That was several years ago. To date, Secure Flight has only been able to get a passing grade on one of the ten points. Next Generation should be subject to exactly the same kind of congressional scrutiny.

by Jim Malmberg

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