Submission + - US Government Expand Tracking Programs
bs0d3 writes: On October 12, slashdot covered how US intelligence intends to mine social network data from sites like facebook and twitter in order to help them predict crimes and track people. Most people felt it was a no-brainer that public information should be expected to be used. Well, what if instead of limiting their tracking to publicly available information on the internet, they were expanding to all the public. A traffic cam at every stop light, and on every street corner, with facial recognition software to track the movements of Americans in the real world. That's exactly what they announced this week, with "Next Generation Identification (NGI)" facial recognition service. NGI will result in a massive expansion of government data collection for both criminal and noncriminal purposes. They already have the largest biometric database in the world, it includes 70 million subjects in the criminal master file and more than 31 million civil fingerprints. With a collection that already contains multimodal biometric identifiers such as iris scans, palm prints, photos, and voice data from criminals; data sharing between the FBI and other government agencies and the repurposing of photographs taken for noncriminal activities will further support the FBI's ability to track people as they move from one location to another. Photos can be taken; for example, from the DMV and implicitly from their social network data mining projects. Over the next two and a half years, the program will begin in four states: Michigan, Washington, Florida, and North Carolina.
