FBI Processes 600 Billion Fingerprints Per Day

[The Straight Story]

FBI Processes 600 Billion Fingerprints Per Day

NEW YORK (CBS) Four hours from Columbus, Ohio, sits a highly-guarded government building that's helping police find criminals faster.

WBNS News CrimeTracker 10's Angela An reports about an advanced federal research facility that processes 600 billion fingerprints a day underground.

The FBI’s multi-billion dollar, two football-field-sized Criminal Justice Information Services building stores roughly 60 million sets of fingerprints and helps law enforcement track everyone from Al Qaeda terrorists to the alleged Craigslist killer.

"On the criminal side, we have identified about 15,000 wanted people per month that are arrested," the facility’s assistant acting director Jerry Pender told Angela An of WBNS News.

......

American troops overseas can identify potential terror suspects from fingerprints on ad hoc explosives using only a laptop and portable scanner, according to the Ohio station. Prints are then checked against thousands of suspected or known terrorists in the FBI database.

In April 2009, a fingerprint that was left on a hotel wall that was sent to the federal faculty linked the accused Craigslist killer Phillip Markoff to an attack against another woman in Boston.


http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/07/21/crimesider/entry5177399.shtml

[Supply Side Jesus]

1. God damn police state...

Solving crimes and all...

[MADem]

2. That's what a senior senator with clout can do....

That facility is in Clarksburg, WVA because Robert Byrd saw an opportunity, and took it!

The video accompanying that article is really interesting--especially the work the students are doing with face ID.

Like it or not, this is the way of the future. On the bright side, biometrics will make it harder for people to steal your identity. On the downside, your movements can be tracked in biometrically-intensive environments.

[alofarabia]

3. I'm calling Bullshit...

The population of the world is about 6.7 billion, but let's be generaous and round up to 10 billion. If 600 billion fingerprints are processed every day that would amount to 60 fingerprints for every man, woman and child in the world EVERY DAY!. So every person in the world has their fingerprints processed at this one building 60 times every day. Impossible, and so obviuously wrong that it defies belief that it could make it make it into a report from a reputable news organization. Angela An (and her editors) need to understand basic statistics.

[Statistical]

4. Your reasoning skills are lacking.

First of all each person has 10 fingerprints, plus dead people were alive once and they had fingerprints.


Also not all fingerprints are linked to persons.

Say there is a gang killing at the crime scene police recover 20 unique fingerprints. The fingerprints can't be indentified but since they are linked to a crime scene they are added to the system. In the future if a suspect is arrested on another crime the system may find a match to a fingerprint left at the scene of an unsolved crime.

Nobody said they have the fingerprints for 600 million unique living people.

There are 300 million people in the United States, each person likely leaves hundreds if not thousands of fingerprint each day. If a tiny fraction end up at a crime scene that ends up being billions a year. The FBI has been collecting fingerprints for 80 years now.

[The Straight Story]

5. Look at it this way, example: 60 million prints on file, you have 1000 cases a day

and you have maybe 10 sets of prints from each case - now you have to compare all those prints against the 60 million, so each of the 10,000 prints found has to be compared 60 million (or less if you find it sooner).

Adds up pretty quick.

[izquierdista]

6. You don't have children, do you?

You can have 60 fingerprints on a clean window a minute after you say "don't touch it". You could collect 600 billion fingerprints just following a kindergarten class through their field trip to the aquarium.

[gmoney]

7. +1

600 million a YEAR I would even find to be a stretch.

Feeding 600 billion of ANYTHING into machines with any sort of meaningful input/tracking/correlation would require a staff of hundreds of thousands of people, and to think that police departments generate even a portion of that much info and can get it to Ohio for processing and that these people can get it back out...

Maybe if there's 600 million on file, and they take one fingerprint and the software effectively compares it to ALL the fingerprints in the file, and do that a thousand times a day, maybe you could stretch that into "processing" that many.

Lies. Damned lies. And Statistics.