By Calvin Biesecker
Information sharing and interoperability among several United States government agencies in the area of biometric databases continues to improve, further closing gaps in unwanted individuals entering and moving about in the United States, according to government officials responsible for some of the largest biometric databases in the country.
Data sharing with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “is a growing area for us,” Dr. Thomas Killion, director of the Army’s Biometrics Identity Management Agency (BIMA), said at last week’s AFCEA Homeland Security conference. The improved information sharing and interoperability is currently better between the Defense Department and the FBI than between DoD and DHS, although this is improving as well, he said.
In 2014, BIMA and the FBI will co-locate many of their biometrics efforts at the Biometrics Technology Center in West Virginia that is currently under construction. In addition, BIMA, which operates the Defense Department’s authoritative biometric database called the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), already has substantial “logical connections” with the FBI’s biometric database, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), Killion said.
Hopefully, in the future, some of DHS’ biometrics efforts will also be housed at the BTC, said Daniel Roberts, assistant director for the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division.
Connectivity between ABIS and the DHS’ biometric database, called IDENT, is “limited” but “increasing,” Killion said.
Bob Mocny, director of DHS’ US-VISIT office, which manages IDENT, says there is information sharing going on daily between ABIS and IDENT but that it is more manual, with “Buffalo Drives” and CD’s used to transfer the biometrics.
“Every day, ever week, every month we get data, we get prints from the DoD,” Mocny said. Latent prints recovered from improvised explosive devices are sent to DHS and in some cases have been used to make identifications, he added.
While that’s interoperability “on the cheap,” Mocny said, “We believe in about a year’s timeframe we’re going to have the full connectivity that we have with the FBI.”
The ultimate goal is a “common data environment” that shares common standards and has “bridges” between the various databases although no single database, Killion added.
“Because we use common standards and we build the bridges among the various systems, we can actually share data appropriately and ensure that we’re not missing someone or a variety of individuals in our process because of the limitations of anyone of those single databases,” Killion said. “So we’re moving to a common environment in terms of being able to share the data. No it’s not a single database. We each have our own databases for specific reasons and which supports the specific functions. But we will be able to share information broadly and effectively among those databases.”
The FBI’s Roberts says the fingerprint records in IAFIS are not owned by the FBI but rather the states and local authorities that collect them. The FBI stores and distributes the records based on agreements with the various states, each of which has laws about what the records can be used for, such as civil or law enforcement purposes, he says.
“The challenge is walking that line and making sure that we’re not violating any of the states’ rights in addition to our own federal rights and federal laws that we have,” Roberts said.
Information sharing and interoperability between DHS and the FBI is also strong, with data sharing going both ways, said Mocny.
Mocny said that the FBI sends DHS thousands of fingerprints daily that are allowing DHS to make “more informed decisions” about people entering and moving about the country, because known and suspected terrorists, people with wants and warrants, sexual predators, are not being identified every single day because of the interoperability we have with the FBI. It makes for a much more informed decisionmaking process throughout Customs and Border Protection.”
For example, under an ongoing pilot program in Detroit, DHS is able to search IAFIS, giving it access to over 65 million fingerprints in less than 15 seconds, Mocny says. Through mid-February DHS had sent nearly 30,000 transactions to IAFIS and obtained 261 matches.
Prior to the pilot, “we had people coming into the country with a criminal history that made them ineligible to come into the country but they came into the country because we didn’t know about it,” he said.
Interoperability is a two-way street, Mocny says. For example, the DHS Secure Communities program, managed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, allows local police departments that arrest individuals to search their fingerprints against IDENT, letting the police know “who is really in front of them and the fact that they may have been deported two to three times before.”
Between October 2008 and Jan. 2011 62,000 convicted criminal aliens have been removed because of Secure Communities, Mocny said.