A November 10th article published by Sunita Patel, Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and Scott Paltrowitz, Volunteer Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Right, reveals how close our nation is to falling under a personal surveillance system that seems eerily similar to the repressive government monitoring that was recorded in George Orwell’s novel, 1984.
…between the potential to monitor all public movements via GPS and the FBI’s ever-expanding Next Generation Identification(NGI) system, which collects and stores all aspects of our personal physical characteristics– our biometric data – Big Brother is already upon us.
NGI is a massive database program that collects and stores personal identifying information such as fingerprints, palm prints, iris scans, scars, marks, tattoos, facial characteristics, and voice recognition. Data can be collected not only from arrested individuals, but also from latent prints (fingerprints left behind at a crime scene or anywhere else) or through handheld “FBI Mobile” biometric scanning devices. Worse than the FBI accessing all your personal data, when NGI becomes fully operational in 2014, other federal agencies will gain access to the bio-data without your knowledge or consent.
The Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Day Labor Organizing Network, and the Benjamin Cardozo Immigrant Justice Clinic recently filed a FOIA lawsuit to uncover how far the FBI is willing to go to probe our personal lives.
The FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services division (CJIS) has already conducted a test study with latent fingerprints and palm prints, collected more than one million palm prints, scheduled an iris scan pilot program, and plans future deployment of technology nationwide to collect other biometric data like scars, marks, tattoos, and facial measurements. What’s more, the government continues to expand domestic use of FBI Mobile scanners initially used in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And the information is being shared with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Coast Guard, foreign governments, and potentially the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Even worse, the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services division (CJIS) has information-sharing relationships with more than 75 countries.
Like any other government tracking system, the program is subject to mistakes that can turn an ordinary citizen’s life into a nightmare.
Expanding NGI raises numerous concerns about government invasion of privacy (because of the access, retention, use, and sharing of biometric information without individual consent or knowledge), the widening of federal government surveillance (the NGI database will hold information that can be used to track individuals long into the future), and the increased risk of errors and vulnerability to hackers and identity thieves.
Federal agencies don’t like to admit that they make mistakes, but we know it happens. Take for example Mark Lyttle, a United States citizen who was mistakenly deported and sent to five different countries in four months after a criminal corrections administrator erroneously typed “Mexico” as his place of birth. Or U.S.-born Brandon Mayfield, who was wrongly accused of perpetrating the 2004 Madrid train bombing and was held in police custody for two weeks based on an alleged match between his fingerprints and latent prints from the crime scene, a match that was later deemed inaccurate.
The article is informative, and if you’re not familiar with the NGI program, then it is definitely worth taking the time to read:
http://uncoverthetruth.org/...