(MintPress) — What does $1 billion in technology upgrades get the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)? The privacy of Americans, it seems. New upgrades to the bureau’s national fingerprint database now include facial recognition, iris scans, DNA analysis and voice identification as part of the Next Generation Identification (NGI) program. While the FBI says the program will help track fugitives on its watch list, concerns of privacy and civil liberties violations have been expressed by advocacy groups around the country.
As it stands, the facial recognition software has been installed at Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) locations in 27 states, which, according to Business Insider, give the FBI real time capabilities of matching those on camera with their identification. During a presentation at the Biometrics Conference to announce the breakthrough technology, the FBI said it would use its new capabilities for fugitive tracking; find missing persons; tracking the movements of subjects of interest; verifying mug shots; identifying people in public databases and conducting surveillance on lookout locations.
With the facial recognition technology and public social media sites such as Facebook, the FBI now has the capacity to store various images of citizens and precisely track them as the program expands. Carnegie Mellon University professor Alessandro Acquisti told a government subcommittee during hearings on the new program that it had the potential to be abused and target citizens who have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
“The combination of face recognition, social networks data and data mining can significantly undermine our current notions and expectations of privacy and anonymity,” Acquisti said.
In a Senate testimony in July, FBI deputy assistant director Jerome Pender said the current pilot program is 60 percent deployed and contains only mugshots of known criminals.
A private enterprise
Biometrics have become a hot commodity in social networking and private businesses across the country. In June, Facebook purchased Israeli facial recognition technology company Face.com to pad its innovative software that would make suggestions for photo tags based off a database of photos of its users. Facebook began scaling back on the technology when a German court ruled that it violated European privacy laws.
With the trove of public data that Facebook now harbors and its similar technological capabilities it has with the FBI, it seems reasonable that Acquisti fears a potential shared dataset between the two entities, which would give the FBI millions of public photos to pair with its current use of mug shots.
Reports also suggest that Disney theme parks were one of the initial entities to champion the biometrics and fingerprint-reading technology in 2006. While Disney representatives have said the addition was solely for customer convenience, a software engineer took to Facebook to tell his side of the story. The man said that he and his girlfriend went on a ride at Disneyland and the park offered the man to purchase a photo of the two on the ride. When he agreed, he noted that his credit card information was already linked to the photo. The man wrote that he never gave Disney any of his personal information and concluded that with his engineering background, Disney was using facial recognition technology to pair identities with personal information.
Disney has said that all the information it scans is stored independently from any other park data, but a lack of transparency from the park makes the details of its practices difficult to confirm, notes the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Others worry that the rash of information collected from the park is far too much to simply allow for admittance.
“It’s impossible for them to convince me that all they are getting is the fact that that person is the ticket-holder,” said Central Florida American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) president George Crossley.
Political activist Naomi Wolf speculated the danger of America’s largest companies using biometrics during a time when the FBI is investing such a large sum of money into the technology.
“What is very obvious is that this technology will not be applied merely to people under arrest, or to people under surveillance in accordance with the fourth amendment (suspects in possible terrorist plots or other potential crimes, after law enforcement agents have already obtained a warrant from a magistrate),” Wolf wrote. “No, the ‘targets’ here are me and you: everyone, all of the time. In the name of ‘national security,’ the capacity is being built to identify, track and document any citizen constantly and continuously.”
Cameras on every corner
Slowly but surely, surveillance in the form of cameras has taken root in America as a new norm. Shortly after the FBI announced its $1 billion biometrics initiative, the New York Police Department (NYPD) and Microsoft unveiled the Domain Awareness System. The collection of cameras are spread throughout the city and provide real-time video feeds to track where 911 calls are coming from and contains license plate readers to pair with its capability to map out recent crime patterns in the city.
Surveillance has also taken a front seat in Chicago, which now has the nation’s largest and most integrated system of video surveillance in the country, the ACLU says. Like other states and cities across the country, surveillance is fed to a “fusion center” – a central database jointed with the Department of Homeland Security but operated by state and local entities. The centers were established after the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a way to aggregate data on suspicious individuals and potential terror threats.
But the program feeds terror paranoia, said constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein in 2009. Fein compared the fusion center trend in the U.S. to those seen in the Soviet Union and East Germany, calling for the U.S. to abandon their use.
“To an intelligence agent, informant or law enforcement officer, everything unconventional or unorthodox looks like at least a pre-embryonic terrorist danger,” Fein said.