About That Creepy Biometric Database, FBI, We’d Like to Know a Bit More

The FBI’s
facial recognition database, into which it wants to put 52
million of our mugs by the end of 2015, is only part of its larger

Next Generation Identification (NGI) program. The NGI program
is intended to give the feds a full range of means to identify us
according to biometric markers, including facial feature, digitized
fingerprints, photographs of tattoos, scans of the irises of human
eyes…

It’s a lot of data for tagging people, all going into a
centralized system. That has plenty of people worried about misuse,
abuse, and the overall nudge this sort of capability gives us
toward a total surveillance state.

Yesterday, 32 organizations from across the political spectrum,
including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation (EFF), and R Street Institute,
asked Attorney General Eric Holder to explain just how the
United States government plans to use the system it’s building and
the data contained therein. Specifically, they want the federal
government to perform a formal Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) to
follow up on the last such report,
done in 2008.

Among other concerns raised, that 2008 PIA conceded that
“Electronic searching of criminal justice images also entails the
risk that the electronic search process may not be sufficiently
reliable to accurately locate other photos of the same identity,
resulting in an unacceptable percentage of misidentifications.”
That concession is underlined by
revelations by the Electronic Privacy Information Center that
federal specifications on the Next Generation Identification system
facial recognition software allow for tagging “an incorrect
candidate a maximum of 20% of the time.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Jennifer Lynch has also
raised concerns about the sources of some the photos in the
database, which are only vaguely identified. “The FBI does not
define either the ‘Special Population Cognizant’ database or the
‘new repositories’ category,” Lynch
warned in April.

Maybe Holder can tell us just where those photos are coming
from.

Of course, Privacy Impact Assessments don’t mean that government
agencies won’t proceed with the projects being assessed. They just
give us a better idea of what we’re being subjected to.

The text of the letter is embedded below.

Signatory organizations are: American Civil Liberties Union,
Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC), Brennan Center for
Justice, Center for Digital Democracy, Center for Democracy &
Technology, Center for Financial Privacy and Human Rights, Center
for National Security Studies, The Constitution Project,
Constitutional Alliance, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of
America, Consumer Watchdog, Council on American-Islamic Relations,
Council for Responsible Genetics, Cyber Privacy Project, Defending
Dissent Foundation, Demand Progress, DownsizeDC.org, Electronic
Frontier Foundation, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC),
Friends of Privacy USA, Government Accountability Project, Liberty
Coalition, NAACP, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers,
National Urban League, OpenTheGovernment.org, Patient Privacy
Rights, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, PrivacyTimes, R Street
Institute, and the World Privacy Forum.