http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/11/10-9Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer equated GPS surveillance with the ultra-repressive government monitoring in George Orwell’s 1984 this week during the oral argument in United States v. Jones (.pdf). The case asks whether the use of a GPS tracking device to monitor an individual’s movements without a warrant violates the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. But between the potential to monitor all public movements via GPS and the FBI’s ever-expanding Next Generation Identification (.pdf)(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.
Documents that the FBI turned over only after a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Day Labor Organizing Network, and the Benjamin Cardozo Immigrant Justice Clinic reveal that the FBI views massive biometric information collection as a goal in itself. 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 (.pdf). What’s more, the government continues to expand domestic use of FBI Mobile (.pdf) scanners initially used in Iraq and Afghanistan.