How the U.S. Military’s Facial Recognition System Works
The military’s biometrics program, launched in 2004, initially focused on the collection and analysis of fingerprints. “In a war without borders, uniforms, or defined lines of battle, knowing who is an enemy is essential,” John D. Woodward, Jr., head of the DoD’s biometrics department, wrote in a 2004 brief.
That year, the Department of Defense contracted Lockheed Martin to start building a biometrics database for an initial fee of $5 million. Progress was slow: by 2009, the DoD Inspector General reported that the biometrics system was still deeply flawed. The department indicated that it was only able to successfully retrieve five positive matches from 150 biometric searches. A later contract with defense industry giant Northrop resulted in similarly disappointing results with reports of “system instability, inconsistent processing times, system congestion, transaction errors, and a 48-hour outage.”
By 2016, the DoD had begun to make serious investments in biometric data collection. That year, the Defense Department deputy secretary Robert O. Work designated biometric identification as a critical capability for nearly everything the department does: fighting, intelligence gathering, law enforcement, security, business, and counter-terrorism. Military leaders began to speak of biometric technology as a “game changer,” and directives from the DoD not only encouraged the use of the technology by analysts, but also by soldiers on the ground. Troops were instructed to collect biometric data whenever possible.
The same year, a defense company named Leidos, which had acquired a large portion of Lockheed’s government IT business, secured a $150 million contract to build and deploy what is now known as the DoD ABIS system.
Between 2008 and 2017, the DoD added more than 213,000 individuals to the BEWL, a subset of DoD’s ABIS database, according to a Government Accountability Office report. During that same period, the Department of Defense arrested or killed more than 1,700 people around the world on the basis of biometric and forensic matches, the GAO report says.
Krizay’s presentation indicates that the United States used biometric matching to identify 4,467 people on the BEWL list in the first two quarters of 2019. The presentation slide breaks down the numbers: 2,728 of those matches were of opposing forces carried out in the “theater,” or area of where U.S. troops are commanded.
DFBA claims that it has data on 7.4 million unique identities within its ABIS database, a majority of those sourced from military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the agency’s website.
That number is constantly growing. The documents suggest the DoD can collect biometric data from detainees, voter enrollments, military enlistments in partner countries, employment vetting, or information given to the military.
“Almost every operation provides the opportunity to collect biometrics,” a 2014 document on military biometrics says. “While quality is desired over quantity, maximizing enrollments in the database will likely identify more persons of interest.”
ABIS also enables different operations and missions to create their own biometric watchlists. These databases can be be plugged into custom-built military mobile devices used to scan fingerprints, irises, and match faces against databases, according to a 2014 document outlining biometric procedures across the branches of the armed forces.
“Fusion of an established identity and information we know about allows us to decide and act with greater focus, and if needed, lethality,” Krizay wrote in his presentation.
But much is still unknown about how the DFBA and defense agencies use facial recognition and biometric data. A FOIA request which would return information about these systems was denied in part by the U.S. Army.
“Public release would be tantamount to providing uncontrolled foreign access,” the response letter said.
from Hacker News https://ift.tt/33pRm3w