Aggregated News
The FBI's facial recognition database, into which it wants to put 52 million of our mugs by the end of 2015, is only part of its larger Next Generation Identification (NGI) program. The NGI program is intended to give the feds a full range of means to identify us according to biometric markers, including facial feature, digitized fingerprints, photographs of tattoos, scans of the irises of human eyes...
It's a lot of data for tagging people, all going into a centralized system. That has plenty of people worried about misuse, abuse, and the overall nudge this sort of capability gives us toward a total surveillance state.
Yesterday, 32 organizations from across the political spectrum, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and R Street Institute, asked Attorney General Eric Holder to explain just how the United States government plans to use the system it's building and the data contained therein. Specifically, they want the federal government to perform a formal Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) to follow up on the last such report, done...
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