FBI Merges Criminal and Civil Fingerprint Database
Feds building huge biometric database on all citizens
For years the FBI maintained it had no interest in scanning fingerprints collected by employers — teachers, lawyers, state and federal workers, even bike messengers now routinely submit fingerprints for employment — but that has now changed.
“For the first time, fingerprints and biographical information sent to the FBI for a background check will be stored and searched right along with fingerprints taken for criminal purposes,” reports the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization dedicated to protecting rights online.
The EFF believes the change is “part of an ever-growing movement toward cataloguing information on everyone in America—and a movement that won’t end with fingerprints.”
Feds building huge biometric database on all citizens
For years the FBI maintained it had no interest in scanning fingerprints collected by employers — teachers, lawyers, state and federal workers, even bike messengers now routinely submit fingerprints for employment — but that has now changed.
“For the first time, fingerprints and biographical information sent to the FBI for a background check will be stored and searched right along with fingerprints taken for criminal purposes,” reports the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization dedicated to protecting rights online.
The change, which the FBI revealed quietly in a February 2015 Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), means that if you ever have your fingerprints taken for licensing or for a background check, they will most likely end up living indefinitely in the FBI’s NGI database. They’ll be searched thousands of times a day by law enforcement agencies across the country—even if your prints didn’t match any criminal records when they were first submitted to the system.
The EFF believes the change is “part of an ever-growing movement toward cataloguing information on everyone in America—and a movement that won’t end with fingerprints.”
