Privacy group EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) has launched a legal campaign against the FBI over its Next Generation Identification system, which comprises fingerprint, iris scan, and facial recognition data.EPIC wants the bureau to release all relevant documents about its plan to share a huge amount of biometric information with the Department of Defense.”With NGI, the FBI will expand the number of uploaded photographs and provide investigators with 'automated facial recognition search capability.' The FBI intends to do this by eliminating restrictions on the number of submitted photographs (including photographs that are not accompanied by tenprint fingerprints) and allowing the submission of non-facial photographs (e.g. scars or tattoos),” the EPIC lawsuit says.”The FBI also widely disseminates this NGI data. According to the FBI's latest NGI fact sheet, 24,510 local, state, tribal, federal and international partners submitted queries to NGI in September 2016.”In October, a report published by the Georgetown Center on Privacy & Technology stated that US police forces are deploying face recognition technology in widespread, advanced, and unregulated areas. The study, The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America finds that one in four law enforcement agencies can access face recognition and that its use is almost completely unregulated. Of the 52 agencies that acknowledged using face recognition in response to 106 records requests, the authors found that only one had obtained legislative approval before doing so. “Innocent people don't belong in criminal databases,” said Alvaro Bedoya, Executive Director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law and co-author of the report. “By using face recognition to scan the faces on 26 states' driver's license and ID photos, police and the FBI have basically enrolled half of all adults in a massive virtual line-up. This has never been done for fingerprints or DNA. It's uncharted and frankly dangerous territory.”
EPIC launches legal action on FBI over biometric database
