MassPrivateI In Pennsylvania, authorized law enforcement can access the state’s Justice Network (JNET) to access critical information for investigations. The JNET Facial Recognition System allows about 500 of JNET’s 40,000 users – individuals from local, state and federal law enforcement – to narrow down a search for a suspect by comparing images from sources like surveillance footage and social media sites against a statewide criminal database containing 3.5 million photos, according to JNET officials.
But since JNET’s Facial Recognition System could only compare photos against images of previously arrested or convicted criminals listed in the statewide database, JNET needed a new method for finding suspects unknown to law enforcement. To broaden its image comparison capabilities, in May, JNET’s facial recognition technology was integrated with the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s (PennDOT) facial recognition system. PennDOT stores 36 million driver’s license and identification photo images in a repository.
PennDOT maintains its own facial recognition system due to concerns over the issuance of duplicate or fraudulent licenses. Luci Stone, a JNET criminal biometrics specialist, said because the system is only used for those specific criminal investigation purposes, the technology is not in use for image comparisons on the general public. (Like the NSA, DHS CIA or the FBI won’t have access to them, don’t believe it)
PennDOT’s facial recognition system was previously only available to a small group of users including the Pennsylvania State Police and the Office of Attorney General. Once the facial recognition systems were integrated, JNET officials report that the single interface still upholds law enforcement policies and citizen privacy.
“There came an opportunity recently for us to integrate the two systems and really do two things at once,” said Dave Naisby, JNET’s executive director. “The first was reduce costs for the Commonwealth, but then the second was to allow our users who had access to both systems the opportunity to search both systems through one user interface.”
According to Stone, only investigators and detectives who have been trained to use the facial recognition system can search across both the criminal and PennDOT databases by using three unique search algorithms.
http://www.govtech.com/public-safety/Pennsylvania-Facial-Recognition-Systems-Integrate-to-Widen-Search-for-Criminals.html
http://www.emergencymgmt.com/safety/Pennsylvania-Facial-Recognition-Systems.html
http://secureidnews.com/news-item/nec-dataworks-plus-offer-pennsylvania-criminal-justice-a-facial-recognition-solution/
Facial biometrics nightmare: coming to a street corner near you
Jennifer Lynch from EFF observed in her superb report on government biometrics programs, the US government currently collects the vast majority of biometrics through criminal justice, immigration and military channels.
The federal government has been investing billions of dollars into projects that enable the incidental and stealth collection of our biometric data, but we lack the statutory protections we need to protect our privacy.
The FBI has fingerprint and face recognition-ready photos (or “face prints”) on every person arrested in the United States in recent decades, and DHS has millions of records of foreign-born people and visitors to the United States. The US military has been capturing and storing biometrics data on Iraqis and Afghanis for nearly a decade now. The State Department maintains a biometrics database of its own, which includes information on everyone who has applied for a visa to visit the United States in recent years.
All of this information — biometrics data on US persons, immigrants, visitors to the country, Iraqis and Afghanis — will soon be retained in a joint FBI-DoD data center in West Virginia, called the Biometrics Technology Center.
The categories of biometrics the government collects, and the methods it uses to collect them, are expanding, too.
Lynch breaks down the biggest biometrics containers in the world, all US government programs: the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint System (IAFIS) and DHS’ Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT), the latter part of the US Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator Technology program (US-VISIT). Additionally, the US Department of Defense maintains the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), containing palmprint, face print and iris scan records on about 6 million people. And the State Department’s Consular Consolidated Database (CCD) holds more than 110 million records and 90 million photographs.
The FBI’s IAFIS contains biometrics collected via both criminal and civil processes. If you are arrested in the United States your fingerprints will be stored in and checked against the database. People who apply for jobs requiring federal background checks, including “childcare workers, law-enforcement officers, lawyers and federal employees” must submit their fingerprints to the FBI, where they are checked against existing criminal records and then stored in IAFIS. Lynch reports that there are “over 71 million subjects in the criminal master file and more than 33 million civil fingerprints.” Over 18,000 law enforcement agencies “at the state, local, tribal, federal and international level” access and contribute data to IAFIS.
The DHS biometrics warehouse, IDENT, obtains data from any “individuals who interact with the various agencies under the DHS umbrella, including Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), US Citizenship and Naturalization Services (USCIS), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the US Coast Guard, and others,” including the State Department. “IDENT processes more than 300,000 “encounters” every day and has 130 million fingerprint records on file,” Lynch writes.
Each state has its own biometrics database, and some regions have regional databases, many of which include DNA data. In some states, like Massachusetts, the government plans on retaining automatic license plate recognition capture data in its Criminal Justice databases, alongside biometric data of arrestees and civil license applicants. As Lynch points out, the pooling of these disparate data points presents a serious threat to our liberty because it “increases the potential for tracking and surveillance.”
When the government can use face-recognition enabled surveillance cameras to identify us from our “face prints”, perhaps compared against our drivers’ license photos, we have lost our ability to walk anonymously in public streets. It’s already a nightmare scenario, and the DOJ appears intent on making it worse.
The new mobile biometric devices allow first responders, police, military and criminal justice organizations to collect biometric data with a handheld device on a street corner or in a remote area and then wirelessly send it for comparison to other samples on watch lists and databases in near real-time.
The FBI’s “Biometrics Center of Excellence” is working hard and fast to develop “breakthrough” biometrics identification tools like the “Automated Face Detection and Recognition” (AFDAR) project, also known as “Cluster Base”, “a forensic image analysis tool that locates faces within images and clusters them based on similarity.” These tools “process stills and video, allowing investigative agencies to analyze large collections of images and video recordings.”
http://www.privacysos.org/node/679
California temporarily halts plans to implant drivers license with RFID chips:
Following complaints from privacy groups, California lawmakers on Friday suspended legislation to embed radio-frequency identification chips, or RFIDs, in its driver’s licenses and state identification cards.
The legislation, S.B. 397, was put on hold by the state Assembly Appropriations Committee, despite it having been approved by the California Senate, where it likely will be re-introduced in the coming months. Had the measure passed, it would have transformed the Golden State’s standard form of ID into one of the most sophisticated identification documents in the country, mirroring the four other states that have embraced the spy-friendly technology.
Radio-frequency identification devices already are a daily part of the electronic age — found in passports, library and payment cards, school identification cards and eventually are expected to replace bar-code labels on consumer goods.
Michigan, New York, Vermont and Washington have already begun embedding drivers licenses with the tiny transceivers, and linking them to a national database — complete with head shots — controlled by the Department of Homeland Security. The enhanced cards can be used to re-enter the U.S. at a land border without a passport.
Privacy advocates worry that, if more states begin embracing RFID, the licenses could become mandatory nationwide and evolve into a government-run surveillance tool to track the public’s movements.
The IDs are the offspring of the 2009 Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative requiring travelers to show passports when they cross the U.S. border of Canada and Mexico. Those carrying the EDL “Enhanced Drivers License” or an “enhanced” state ID, do not have to display a passport when traveling across the country’s government-run land borders.
“It’s not difficult to imagine a time when the EDL programs cease to be optional—and when EDLs contain information well beyond a picture, a signature, and citizenship status. The government also tends to expand programs far beyond their original purpose,” writes Jim Harper, the Cato Institute’s director of information policy studies. “Californians should not walk — they should run away from ‘enhanced’ drivers licenses.”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/09/drivers-license-rfid-chips/
——————-
http://massprivatei.blogspot.com/2013/09/pennsylvania-dot-to-enter-36-million.html