A “pilot” of iris recognition technology by the FBI has silently continued and collected nearly 430,000 iris scans over the past three years, according tech media.What started as a pilot in 2013 has grown into a database “without any public debate or oversight”, said the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).The San Bernardino Sheriff's Department has quietly become one of the most productive nodes in a nationwide iris-scanning project, collecting iris data from at least 200,000 arrestees over the last two and a half years, according to documents obtained by The Verge.The magazine notes that in the early months of 2016, the department was collecting an average of 189 iris scans each day.An FBI spokesperson confirmed to the Verge that since its launch in 2013, the program has stockpiled iris scans from 434,000 arrestees.This is a case of “runaway surveillance”, ACLU director of technology Nicole Ozer tweeted on the biometric tech.in 2013, the FBI launched an iris pilot program as part of its Next Generation Identification (NGI) programme. NGI includes fingerprints, face recognition, iris scans and palm printsThe magazine notes how in a in a recent speech at the connect:ID 2016 conference, FBI project manager Nick Megna described the technology as particularly useful in the case of a prison break or mistaken release.Police could use iris scanners to check each person passing through a roadblock, where taking fingerprints would require too much contact to be practical.An FBI spokesperson informed The Verge that a privacy impact assessment wasn't considered necessary on the iris data gathering by 2014 “because the pilot was conducted with very limited participation for a limited period of time in order to evaluate iris technology.” The pilot program has now been extended each year since it started.But time has passed and most of the 430,000 iris scans have been collected since the initial decision not to create a PIA.

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