The FBI will have up to 52 available millions photos of citizens registered in the Next Generation Identification (NGI) database, up to 2015.
Next Generation Identification already includes fingerprint files for over 100 million people, while it is designed to include additional, more advanced biometric features. These include palm imprint, eye iris scanning and, of course, facial recognition.
All of this information will be combined and registered with other personal information data relating to an individual: name, home address, social security number, immigration status (if not a US citizen); age, race, etc. The contents of this giant database will be "shared" with nearly 18.000 federal and state law enforcement agencies of all sizes in the United States.
According to published data, by 2012 NGI contained 13,6 million photos from 7-8 million people. The number of photos by mid-2013 reached 16 million. The forecast is that by 2015 the number of registered photos will reach 52 million.
Noteworthy is the fact that the database will be able to process 55.000 photos daily and can perform hundreds of thousands of searches each day. However, it is worrying that NGN's include 4,3 millions of photographs taken for "non-criminal" purposes.
Όπως αναφέρεται σε δημοσίευμα του Verge, αρκετές επιχειρήσεις στις ΗΠΑ ζητούν έλεγχο του ποινικού μητρώου ή έλεγχο δακτυλικών αποτυπωμάτων από υποψήφιους εργαζομένους τους, τα οποία στέλνονται στο FBΙ. Όπως σημειώνει το Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), στο πλαίσιο αυτών των ελέγχων ζητείται πλέον και φωτογραφία, μαζί με τα δακτυλικά footprints, a first in FBI annals.
It is worth noting that each entry in the NGI will receive a unique number, the Universal Control Number (UCN), on the basis of which an individual will be searched, whether he has a criminal record or not. Until now, only people who had committed a crime were registered in such databases.
The data was provided by the FBI itself at the request of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) under a law on free access to information.
