Saturday, July 9, 2011

The FBI's Next Generation Identification: Bigger and Faster but Much Worse for Privacy

Click here to access article by Jennifer Lynch from Electronic Frontier Foundation.

It appears that the FBI is building a huge database on all of us by accessing many governmental department files --of course, in the name of fighting terrorism.
This week, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and several other organizations released documents from a FOIA lawsuit that expose the concerted efforts of the FBI and DHS to build a massive database of personal and biometric information. This database, called “Next Generation Identification” (NGI), has been in the works for several years now. However, the documents CCR posted show for the first time how FBI has taken advantage of the DHS Secure Communities program and both DHS and the State Department’s civil biometric data collection programs to build out this $1 billion database.