THE FBI WANTS TO EXEMPT MASSIVE BIOMETRIC DATABASE FROM THE PRIVACY ACT

[askeptic]

Source: The Intercept

A BROAD COALITION of 45 signatories, including civil liberties, racial justice, human rights, and privacy organizations, published a letter Tuesday strongly condemning a proposal by the FBI to exempt its massive biometric database from certain provisions of the Privacy Act. Known as the Next Generation Identification system, or NGI, the FBI database houses the world’s largest collection of fingerprints, DNA profiles, palm prints, face images, and other biometric identifiers. The letter, signed by groups such as La Raza, Color of Change, Amnesty International, National LGBTQ Task Force, as well as the companies Uber and Lyft, criticized the agency’s May 5 proposal on the grounds that the “system uses some of the most advanced surveillance technologies known to humankind, including facial recognition, iris scans, and fingerprint recognition.”

Specifically, the FBI’s proposal would exempt the database from the provisions in the Privacy Act that require federal agencies to share with individuals the information they collect about them and that give people the legal right to determine the accuracy and fairness of how their personal information is collected and used. The exemption could render millions of records unavailable to subjects. As of December 2015, the NGI system contained 70,783,318 criminal records and 38,514,954 civil records.

As the coalition notes with alarm, the database stores millions of unique identifiers for U.S. citizens who have not been convicted of a crime alongside those who have. Fingerprints taken for an employer’s background checks, for instance, can be stored and searched in the NGI’s system along with those taken for criminal investigations.

Read more: https://theintercept.com/2016/06/01/the-fbi-wants-to-exempt-massive-biometric-database-from-the-privacy-act/

---

We have to get the people who want to turn the US (and the world) into (more of?) a police state out of power...

[MADem]

1. Everyone who has served in the military in the last few decades has

their DNA on file.

They've been collecting it at military physicals since at least the nineties.

[Downwinder]

2. I'm on Medicare so I am certain they have all my data.

[askeptic]

3. It's not about the data per se - it's about you not being able to know about or correct it

Specifically, the FBI’s proposal would exempt the database from the provisions in the Privacy Act that require federal agencies to share with individuals the information they collect about them and that give people the legal right to determine the accuracy and fairness of how their personal information is collected and used.