FBI, DHS Share Databases

Announced Sunday (which is, one suspects, the 'new Friday' for public disclosure of controversial news), the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have finished merging two large-scale fingerprint databases, and are now rolling out front ends to police departments, FBI investigators and DHS and Immigration agents, airport inspectors, border agents and other authorities. The contributory databases are IDENT, a DHS database containing over 1 million fingerprint records of illegal immigrants ordered deported, and the FBI's IAFIS (Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System), containing biometric data and criminal history on 47 million people.

The fused system will give FBI and DHS investigators immediate access to all pooled data -- improving greatly on an unweildy, non-realtime query-and-reporting system in place before.

According to Robert Mocny, Acting Director of US-VISIT (the agency tasked with managing the DHS database), as quoted in an article by Marisa Taylor of McClatchy Newspapers (reprinted yesterday by the San Jose Mercury News), the Dallas and Boston Police Departments will be among the first to trial the new system -- and Mocny intends to make it generally available to police departments as scaling issues are worked out.

Though not explicitly stated, Mocny implies that one scaling goal will be to increase capacity and streamline input process for the IDENT database, so maintenance doesn't overwhelm immigration officials. Taylor's article quotes him as saying: "We've got about 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States ... We want to build up the capacity of how we're going to be able to respond."

Though legal bars doubtless exist governing the ability of police departments to add records to the central store; and though there's been no ostensible alteration of IDENT's brief (i.e., to contain only records of immigrants under order of deportation after due process), the potential is pretty clear -- the mid-term goal is one, big database referencing all illegals intersecting with police; the longer-term goal, potentially, to extend this database to include all visitors of questionable status.

Even in the short term, access to this database removes a substantial practical bar to police departments enforcing immigration laws -- something police (and most local governments) are not, by and large, itching to do, since they believe it will conflict with practical law enforcement, community relations, and business. It will be interesting to see whether DHS and the administration can mobilize to begin forcing the issue.

Meanwhile, the IDENT component of the database may not be 100% useful, since it currently contains only two fingerprint impressions per record -- insufficient data for a positive ID in some cases. US-VISIT plans to upgrade to a full ten-impression set over the next two years.

Posted by John Jainschigg at 11:03 AM  Permalink