[ Russia Today]
Soon the FBI will be done building a database containing the
photographs, fingerprints and other biometric data for millions of
Americans, but the agency has been far from forthcoming with the
details. A new lawsuit filed this week aims to change that.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit digital rights
group based out of California, sued the United States Department
of Justice this week for failing to comply with multiple Freedom
of Information Act requests filed last year by the EFF.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation received no fewer than three
FOIA requests from the EFF last year for details about its
state-of-the-art Next Generation Identification program, or NGI,
a system that will store personally-identifiable data for
millions of Americans and foreign nationals to act as what the
FBI has called a "bigger, faster and better" version of
what law enforcement already uses. But while the bureau has
indeed already been using fingerprint information to track down
potential terrorists and troublemakers for years, the EFF’s main
concern revolves around what sort of space-age face recognition
abilities NGI will be able to employ.
The FBI previously acknowledged that NGI will “house
multimodal biometrics records like palm prints and iris
scans” in one master system, as well as facial imaging
information and intelligence about scars, marks and tattoos.
Eventually, the agency said, it hopes to incorporate technology
to track down people using only their voice. For now, though, the
EFF is interested in what the facial recognition infrastructure
will be able to do, and is demanding the FBI fesses up.-[Full Article]
