Bureau Beefs Up Biometrics Capabilities

Signal, Sep 2008 by Lawlor, Maryann

FBI seeks the best of the best in nonproprietary, interoperable biometrics collection tools.

Bionics made Col. Steve Austin better, stronger and faster as the lead 1970s television character in The Six Million Dollar Man so he could defeat fictional bad guys, but it will be biometrics that make the Federal Bureau of Investigation's capabilities bigger, better and faster to fight real adversaries. And, while the fictional Office of Scientific Intelligence spent $6 million on its singular secret bio-weapon, the bureau will spend $1 billion during the next 10 years to enhance identification systems that will benefit the entire United States. During that time, fingerprint database capacity will be doubled, and emerging identification techniques such as iris and facial recognition will be adopted after verifying their reliability and worth.

The Next Generation Identification (NGI) system is the Federal Bureau of Investigation's (FBI's) framework for a future multimodal biometrics system. The contract, awarded to an industry team led by Lockheed Martin's Transportation and security Solutions division in Rockville, Maryland, calls for the companies to design, develop, document, integrate, test and deploy the new system. Lockheed Martin's primary job is as integrator-evaluating and choosing the best products. FBI officials maintain that the move to the NGI system will not expand the categories of individuals from whom fingerprints and biometric data will be collected; it will, however, enable the collection of additional biometric data from criminals and terrorists.

Leading the FBI in this mega effort is the bureau's Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) division. The divisions' home in Clarksburg, West Virginia, is the birthplace of the current best-known and widely used identification verification system: the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS).

Thomas E. Bush UJ, assistant director, CJIS, notes that the bureau's customers-law enforcement organizations throughout the United States as well as many federal agencies-were not exactly knocking down the door and asking for new biometric means to verify identities. "Regardless, I think we were far-sighted enough to see that there are going to be needs for these other biometrics," Bush says. "NGI will give us bigger, better, faster capabilities and lead us into the future."

The extensive use of the current IAFIS system certainly demonstrates the critical need to boost capabilities. While the number of checks of suspected criminals has remained fairly steady, work from other areas has increased significantly. "We have a lot more demands on our system now. We just broke another record-nearly 147,000 completions in a 24-hour period," Bush relates. A completion is identification of a 10-fingerprint submission. The system was built to handle 62,500 completions a day, he adds.

The IAFTS system is being pushed to the limits in turnaround times as well. While in the law enforcement area it was built to provide identifications from fingerprints two hours after receipt, more than 90 percent of the time the information is provided in 12 to 15 minutes. In comparison, Bush shares that when he joined the FBI in 1975, it could take as long as two months to accomplish this same task for one set of fingerprints.

On the noncriminal side of the identification work, the promise was to have the information ready in 24 hours; in more than 90 percent of the requests, this work is complete in two hours.

"The [IAFIS] system contains about 57 million of what I call bad-guy prints, and everybody wants identification as quickly as they can get it. That's been a challenge. IAFIS was built with mid-1990s technology, and I think it's done a fantastic job," he adds.

In addition to its support of traditional customers, the FBI now checks the identities of visa applicants for the U.S. State Department. Beginning in January 2008, the bureau became part of the worldwide process of 10-print identity verification, a job that involves processing approximately 15,000 print sets a day, each now completed in less than 15 minutes.

And yet another job the FBI has taken on recently is fingerprint identification at a dozen ports of entry. "That's a big reason for these increases in numbers, and there are more laws being passed all the time for these civil background checks," Bush points out.

Although CJIS worked with the U.S. Defense Department's Biometrics Fusion Center prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that relationship has grown as well. "They're in the middle of their next-generation AFIS, so the systems [the Defense Department's APIS and the NGI] are and will be based on the same standards. Clearly, the key to interoperability is the development and use of standards," Bush states.

As part of the decision to move ahead with developing the NGI system, CJIS commissioned a requirements study. The division's senior staff members emphasized that they wanted the evaluation to be as customer-inclusive as possible, so the study garnered input from the international and information technology communities as well as from legacy customers, including the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland security and the intelligence community. "We recognized that inclusion was critical," Bush states. One of the reasons inclusion is so important in the planning stages is that enhancing information sharing among federal, state and local authorities is one of the primary goals of the NGI system, he adds.