If FBI Has Your Biometrics, It Doesn't Have to Tell You...
IF THE FBI HAS YOUR BIOMETRICS, IT DOESN'T HAVE TO TELL
YOU
By Mohana Ravindranath August 2, 2017 6:09 PM
A new rule will prevent millions of people from finding
out if their fingerprints, iris scans and other biometric information is stored
in a massive federal database.
The FBI’s Next Generation Identification system stores
the biometric records of people who have undergone background checks for jobs,
volunteer positions and military service, as well as of those who have criminal
records. Effective Aug. 31, that database will be exempt from certain parts of
the Privacy Act, a law that allows people whose records are held by the federal
government to request more information about which records those are.
The exemption means the FBI doesn't have to acknowledge
if it is storing the biometric records of an individual in that database; the
bureau has argued that notifying people that they were in the database could
compromise investigations.
The FBI published the final rule this week.
Under the rule, individuals won't be able to find out
what types of records the FBI may have of because it could “specifically reveal
investigative interest by the FBI or agencies that are recipients of the
disclosures.”
Most of the criminal records in that database are
obtained from state and local agencies at the time of arrest, so the FBI cannot
always collect information directly from the individual or notify them that
their records are being included. "It is not feasible," the final
rule said.
The FBI posted a draft of that rule last year. In that
draft, the bureau argued that some records it keeps might seem irrelevant to
ongoing investigations, but could eventually end up being necessary for
“authorized law enforcement purposes."
The Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy
group in Washington, has tried to persuade the FBI to reduce its data
collection and the exemptions from the Privacy Act. After suing the FBI for
information about the information stored in the Next Generation Identification
System, EPIC concluded that the database has an up to 20 percent error rate for
facial recognition searches.
Though it’s not clear exactly how many records are in the
system, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, another advocacy group, estimated
in 2014 that it could contain up to 52 million facial images by 2015.
One of the most troubling consequences of the final rule
is that people in the database might become the subject of investigation
without being notified, Jeramie Scott, EPIC’s Domestic Surveillance Project
director, told Nextgov. A person whose image is erroneously called up in a
search for a different individual might also find themselves being
investigated, he explained.
The FBI is “now in a position as the determiner of when
the exemption applies,” he said.
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