14 DAY TRIAL // The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) released yesterday a report on the FBI's face recognition system, known as Facial Analysis, Comparison, and Evaluation (FACE).
The government agency reveals that the FBI's FACE system has access to more photos than previously thought, totaling over 411.9 million images.
Until now, the US public has been told that the FBI had created a database of images for its face recognition database known as Next Generation Identification (NGI). According to the FBI's tally, this database contained around 30 million images from civil and criminal mug shots.
The GAO has revealed today that the FBI bartered with several US states and gained access to additional images stored in the State Department’s Visa and Passport databases, the Defense Department’s biometric database, and the multiple drivers license databases.
FBI does not have access to these databases in all states, but it's negotiating with at least 18 states.
The GAO report highlights that many of these databases contain images of persons who have not committed any crime, or foreign citizens. It also indicates that the FBI can search these databases at will.
NGI and FACE systems have not been thoroughly tested
Worse is that the FACE system has not been properly tested, and this applies especially to the NGI system. GAO officials stress that the face recognition searchers are not accurate enough and may lead to the misidentification of innocent persons.
Furthermore, the FBI has failed to follow Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) procedures, which state that the FBI should provide public notice of its intentions regarding investigation methods, in order for the public to ensure that the proper privacy protections are in place.
GAO officials say the FBI did the opposite thing, updating its PIA policy for the NGI system in 2015 after it modified the program in 2008, and introduced a PIA for the FACE system in 2015, three years after the program launched.
