Pleased with how various federal partners are sharing information between their respective biometric databases, a House panel that funds the Defense Department proposes to transfer over $26 million from warfighting accounts to the Army’s Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) and boost the budget request for the system by nearly $4 million.
The House Appropriations Committee in its markup of the FY ’12 defense budget request says that ABIS has an “enduring requirement” and transfers $26.2 million from the Army’s overseas contingency operations budget to the baseline funding account for the biometric database. The committee also increased funding by $3.8 million for ABIS to improve data sharing with federal partners.
Northrop Grumman [NOC] is responsible for developing and constructing the next-generation ABIS system for the Army, which is the Defense Department’s authoritative database for the storage and matching of fingerprints and other biometrics by United States forces. The system stores fingerprints, face, iris and palm print records, including images captured electronically and lifted from bomb fragments and other evidence.
Last month Northrop Grumman received a potential $141 million task order to begin increasing the storage capacity and daily transaction load of ABIS.
Other databases that ABIS has become increasingly interoperable with include the Department of Homeland Security’s IDENT system, which stores and matches fingerprints of travelers coming to the U.S. as well as illegal migrants who have been apprehended, the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which stores fingerprints of criminals and known and suspected terrorists, and other law enforcement agencies.
Noting that the Army has become an “increasingly significant partner” in the biometric sharing effort, the committee says it is “pleased with the excellent coordination and cooperation among federal agencies in enhancing interoperability, accelerating the response times, and sharing biometric information for national security and law enforcement purposes.”