Announced last February, The new FBI database, called Next Generation Identification (NGI), has many privacy advocates worried. It will already add palm prints, but it is the new, and seemingly massive, collection of photos that seems to be the main concern. By adding more photos, NGI is seen to be automatically creating a facial recognition database. Add this to the iris scans and the palm prints, and one could become very worried over issues of privacy.
The government claims that they will respect privacy concerns, but how can they when the government itself receives failing marks, year after year, on securing their own systems? They won’t even comply with espionage laws, laws forbidding illegal actions, or subpoenas.
“We aren’t going to start collecting irises from everyone and their brother,” Bush says. “We adhere to very strict privacy guidelines. We’re taking more biometrics from the same people we were always authorized to take fingerprints from.”
When Americans are subjected to more and more police questioning and detention, particularly when you take a photo of a police officer or a building, your biometric information could be taken from you despite having done no wrong.
Any new images or scans will have to be collected by individual law enforcement agencies and then integrated into the NGI system. As for security concerns, the FBI says its fingerprint database has never been hacked. So while the addition of new kinds of data flowing between agencies—both in the United States and abroad, since the Bureau hopes to exchange data with other nations—could create new opportunities for hackers, there’s little precedent for such breaches.
So, we’re now going to practice security through obscurity? Once you give access to your database to someone else, whether it be national or international agencies, security is out of your hands.
Digital rights advocates such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the ACLU have said that the NGI technology is not far enough along to begin implementation, and that sharing vast amounts of biometric data could lead to inaccuracies. Lockheed and the FBI, however, do not claim that the system will harvest personal information from existing commercial biometric databases, or capture information without the subject’s knowledge.
While this is still considered a concept and not an actual database just yet, a multi-year contract has been given to Lockheed Martin to develop the technology.
We should not be accepting the fact that biometrics are going to save us from all the bad guys out there. There are too many false positives and far too many ways to circumvent the current systems already in place.
One particularly easy way to defeat the iris scanners is to have your pupils dilated. This was clearly shown to work in a BBC documentary last year. Some eye drops could do the trick. Retinal scans, besides being bad for your eyes, also aren’t very good because your retina changes over time as old cells die and new ones grow.
Gathering all this information might be helpful to law enforcement. It could easily help them solve crimes, but no one is looking at what will be, essentially, a goldmine for hackers and identity thieves. Still not convinced? How about the fact that retinal scans give away great details about what diseases you might possibly have? Do you think that information won’t be abused? Iris scans are still buggy and not totally reliable.
I would much rather live in a world where some crimes go unsolved instead of having erroneous information condemn an innocent person. Privacy issues must be addressed, with clear-cut consequences for the individuals, agencies, and/or governments that intend to use them. While it would be great to say we shouldn’t have any sort of identification systems and that people should just be “left the hell alone,” this isn’t practical in the real world. We need to come to a compromise and realize that some things need to be kept for identification purposes, while others should never be used. These scanners, however, are not the answer.
