The Departments of Defense and Homeland Security this month turned on new applications that will enhance interoperability between their respective authoritative repositories of biometric records that are used to deprive anonymity to known and suspected terrorists in war zones and help keep terrorists and criminals from entering the United States.
Up until early May there wasn’t “true interoperability” between the DoD Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) and the DHS IDENT system, Patrick Nemeth, director of the Identity Operations Division of the Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM) at DHS, says at the annual connect:ID conference on May 3. At the start of May, OBIM and DoD “went live” with the Defense Department’s BEWL Dissemination Management Server (BDMS) that provides IDENT with real-time additions, edits, and deletions to the BEWL data enrolled in IDENT,” Nemeth tells HSR in response to follow-up questions.
BEWL stands for Biometrically Enabled Watchlist and is basically a subset of biometric data generated by the ABIS system. DHS uses IDENT to screen foreign nationals arriving to the U.S., whether at ports of entry or via illegal border crossings on land or in the maritime domain.
Before the stand-up of the BDMS, Nemeth says that without the direct connection between ABIS and IDENT, “it is a manual process that requires a daily update to be loaded to a Secure File Transfer Protocol server, retrieved by OBIM, and manually enrolled into the DHS Automated Biometric Identification System.”
The real-time capabilities that BDMS offer don’t completely close the interoperability gap between IDENT and ABIS but narrow the gap, Nemeth says. Nemeth adds that the BDMS offers the capability that “can later be expanded to provide full interoperability, including transactional queries and other data sharing.” Eventually, work will be done so that the DoD ABIS system can automatically query IDENT, he says.
The new server means “better service to our customers,” Nemeth says.
“DHS components have found the identity information collected by the Department of Defense to be vital in accurately vetting individuals for border entry, immigration benefits, transportation credentials, and law enforcement encounters,” he says in the email response to questions. “We are excited about the ability to deliver even more timely and accurate information to DHS officers and agents who must make important national security and public safety decisions every day.”