The FBI has been working on rolling out their Next Generation Identification (NGI) for several years now. The first phase went online in 2008. It will be fully functional next year, although it will most likely be in a constant state of upgrade. It has cost about $1.2 billion at this point. naturally, there are privacy concerns with a database that large.
Below is a very informative article at Biometric Update. It describes the six increments of the NGI. The article is written from a biometrics-can-solve-all-the -world's-problems point of view. So to get a more balance perspective you can read the Electronic Freedom Foundations article on NGI here -
And you can read the information from the Electronic Privacy Information Center here -
NGI: A closer look at the FBI’s billion-dollar biometric program
November 4, 2013 - Representing a $1.2 billion investment
by the U.S. federal government, the FBI’s massive Next Generation
Identification (NGI) program is a ten-year lifecycle project that
hinges on biometric identification technologies and has seen privacy
advocates butt heads with law enforcement since its inception.
Split into six “increments,”
Lockheed Martin was awarded a contract in 2008 to design, build and
implement the program on behalf of the FBI, which ultimately aims to
enhance the abilities of the agency’s aging IAFIS from the
mid-nineties.
BiometricUpdate had a chance to talk
with the FBI about what the program entails, how it works as well as
some next steps for this controversial project.
Increment Zero: Workstation Replacement
Increment zero went live in 2008 and
was an overall “tech-refresh” of IAFIS workstations, replacing
obsolete hardware with new high-definition monitors, as well as the
introduction of modular and replaceable infrastructure for examiners.
Increment One: Ten-print processing
Increment one, which went live in 2011
enhanced the agency’s ability to perform back-end processing of
ten-print fingerprint data from IAFIS, using algorithms from
MorphoTrak, a subsidiary of Morpho. This initially saw a 92.6 percent
accuracy rate, though according to Art Ibers, director of criminal
justice solutions for Lockheed Martin, the NGI is now 99.6 percent
accurate in this regard.
“We had increment one and IAFIS
side-by-side for five days, and in those five days, the NGI
identified 910 additional matches that the legacy system missed,”
Ibers said. “We immediately saw value.”
This was an important increment in
establishing the NGI, as ten-print records have been collected widely
for years at local, state and federal levels, so there was a large
dataset to begin with. Now, synced at a national level, law
enforcement agencies say they’re seeing results.
According to Clark Nelson, a senior VP
of Marketing at MorphoTrak, the company continues to invest heavily
into research and development for improving its processing algorithms
as even minor adjustments lead to significant improvements when
dealing with big data.
“If you think about it, when you’re
talking about databases of tens of millions – or upwards of
hundreds of millions of records – and about thousands of searches
per day, an extra tenth of a percent in accuracy can lead to hundreds
of new matches,” Nelson said. “Even though [our algorithms] are
99 percent accurate already, we strive to go beyond that.”
