The Homeland Security Department is retiring the
decades-old system officials use to analyze biometric data, and its replacement
is poised to both refine and significantly expand the agency’s application of
the controversial technology.
The new cloud-based
platform, called the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology
System, or HART, is expected to bring more processing power, new analytics
capabilities and increased accuracy to the department’s biometrics operations.
It will also allow the agency to look beyond the three types of biometric data
it uses today—face, iris and fingerprint—to identify people through a variety
of other characteristics, like palm prints, scars, tattoos, physical markings
and even their voices.
And by freeing the agency from the limitations of its legacy
system, HART could also let officials grow the network of external partners
with whom they share biometric data and analytics capabilities, according to
Patrick Nemeth, director of identity operations within Homeland Security’s
Office of Biometric Identity Management.
“When we get to HART, we will be better, faster, stronger,” Nemeth
said in an interview with Nextgov.
“We'll be relieved of a lot of the capacity issues that we have now ... and
then going forward from there we'll be able to add [capabilities].”
The agency’s existing platform, the Automated Biometric
Identification System, or IDENT, was stood up in 1994 to help federal law
enforcement officials collect and process fingerprints, but in recent years
officials retrofitted the system with facial and iris recognition tools. Today,
IDENT houses identity data on more than 250 million different people, and it
serves as the “workhorse” for the department’s expanding biometric
identification regime, according to Nemeth.
But as the agency rolls out facial recognition technology across U.S. airports and
increases the use of biometrics at the border,
officials are finding themselves constrained by their legacy tech.
“You can only take a 25-year-old system so far,” Nemeth said. “We
need to have more throughput capacity, we need more storage, and you can't just
keep adding to an old system. It's time to go back and re-architect it from the
beginning for all that rapid access.”
Last year, Northrop Grumman won a $95
million contract to develop the first phase of the HART roll
out, which, according to Nemeth, essentially amounts to building a leaner
version of IDENT that can accept new biometric capabilities down the line. In
June, the department released a solicitation for the second phase of the
project, which will entail standing up those new capabilities and deploying the
system within the department. Phase one is expected to wrap up in 2021.
According to the latest solicitation, HART will be housed in
Amazon Web Services’ GovCloud, adding to the companies’ expansive portfolio of high-profile government clients.
Homeland Security officials were initially hesitant to migrate such sensitive
data to the cloud, Nemeth said, but they ultimately determined AWS would
provide the same level of security as any agency data center. Other agency
leaders have echoed those
claims.
Still, Nemeth was quick to note his office doesn’t want to lock
itself in with any particular vendor for either cloud services or biometric
identification tools. Officials intentionally divided the HART roll out into
two phases to prevent a single provider from monopolizing the department’s
biometrics operations, he said. With recognition technology still in its early
days, officials want the option to adopt new, better tools as they come to
market.
“We're making sure that, given all the different [biometric]
modalities and the way things are developing in the IT industry, we have
options later on,” he said.
Officials will continue to use IDENT as it stands up HART over the
next few years, Nemeth said, and they won’t officially retire the legacy system
until its replacement has been tried and tested in the field.
Beyond raw computing power, the HART system also promises to
improve the actual application of biometric technology by allowing the agency
to check multiple data points, or modalities, at the same time. This “fusion”
of different identifiers stands to improve the accuracy of officials’ assessments
recognition, Nemeth said.
Today, when an official runs a person’s face, fingerprint or iris
scans through IDENT’s massive database, the system doesn’t return a single
result. Rather, it assembles a list of dozens of potential candidates with different
levels of confidence, which a human analyst must then look through to make a
final match. The system can only handle one modality at a time, so if agent is
hypothetically trying to identify someone using two different datapoints, they
need to assess two lists of candidates to find a single match. This isn’t a
problem if the system identifies the same person as the most likely match for
both fingerprint and face, for example, but because biometric identification is
still an imperfect science, the results are rarely so clear cut.
However, the HART platform can include multiple datapoints in a
single query, meaning it will rank potential matches based on all the
information that’s available. That will not only make it easier for agents to
analyze potential matches, but it will also help the agency overcome data
quality issues that often plague biometric scans, Nemeth said. If the face
image is pristine but the fingerprint is fuzzy, for example, the system will
give the higher-quality datapoint more weight.
“We're very hopeful that it will provide better identification
surety than we can provide with any single modality today,” Nemeth said. And
palm prints, scars, tattoos and other modalities are added in the years ahead,
the system will be able to integrate those into its matching process.
The phase-two solicitation also lists DNA-matching as a potential
application of the HART system. While the department doesn’t currently analyze
DNA, officials on Wednesday announced they
would start adding DNA collected from hundreds of thousands of detained
migrants to the FBI’s criminal database. During the interview, Nemeth said the
agency is still working through the legal implications of storing and sharing
such sensitive data. It’s also unclear whether DNA information would be housed
in the HART system or a separate database, he said.
HART will also include a data warehouse and performance testing
environment where Nemeth’s team can trial new tools and conduct broader
analysis of the agency’s operations. Officials currently need to test tools,
troubleshoot field equipment and run experimental queries in IDENT’s production
environment, which pulls its limited computing resources away from agents in
the field. With the new platform, officials can scale up those efforts without
impacting the agency’s day-to-day operations, Nemeth said.
As the department deploys more biometric software in the field,
lawmakers and civil liberties advocates have called for
more regulations on the government’s use of the tech. Today, there isn’t a
single law on the books governing the facial recognition and identification
tools that are already widely used by
federal law enforcement, and without regulation, many fear those applications
could infringe on Americans’ civil liberties and perpetuate discrimination.
Critics have taken particular issue with the government’s tangled
web of information sharing agreements, which allow data to spread far beyond
the borders of the agency that collected it. The Homeland Security Department
currently shares its biometric data and capabilities with numerous groups,
including but not limited to the Justice, Defense and State departments.
In the years ahead, HART promises to strengthen those partnerships
and allow others to flourish, according to Nemeth. While today the department
limits other agencies’ access to IDENT to ensure they don’t consume too much of
its limited computing power, HART will do away with those constraints.
“Currently, we have to be very mindful and use modelling to make
sure the quantity, the volume that a new partner might want to use would not
adversely affect all of our current stakeholders,” he said. “HART will raise
that limit.”
While information sharing agreements themselves aren’t necessarily
a bad thing, it all depends on how groups use the data they receive, according
to Mana Azarmi, the policy counsel for the Freedom, Security and Technology
Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology. A person might give
information to a single agency thinking it would be used for one specific
purpose, but depending on how that information is shared, they could
potentially find themselves subjected to unforeseen negative consequences,
Azarmi said in a conversation with Nextgov.
“The government
gets a lot of leeway to share information,” she said. “In this age of
incredible data collection, I think we need to rethink some of the rules that
are in place and some of the practices that we’ve allowed to flourish post-9/11.
We may have overcorrected.”
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