Lockheed Martin [LMT] has begun delivering to the FBI the first Advanced Technology Workstations (ATW) under the Next Generation Identification (NGI) program, marking the first operational milestone of the agency’s new biometric matching system.
The workstations will first be used with the FBI’s current biometric matching system, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) that is being replaced by NGI. The workstations feature larger display screens with higher resolution to better present biometric data, allowing analysts to make decisions faster.
Lockheed Martin plans to deliver and install over 800 of the ATWs by April at multiple sites. The first workstations were installed at the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division facility in Clarksburg, W.Va. The flexible design of the workstations allows for future technology and biometric upgrades.
“The current IAFIS receives an average of 160,000 fingerprint transactions per day, and, on several occasions, it has processed more than 200,000 transactions in a 24-hour period,” Jerome Pender, deputy assistant director for the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services, said in a statement. “These ATWs will greatly improve the FBI’s ability to assess fingerprint matches.”