FBI Director Doesn’t Think Agency Will Spy On Americans, Fails To Mention It Already Is
THINKSTOCK
FBI Director James Comey insisted during a House Judiciary Committee Hearing Wednesday that his agency doesn’t — and will not — use the government’s sophisticated facial recognition technology to keep tabs on innocent civilians. But there’s probably more to the story than he let on.
Earlier this year, a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed that the FBI plans to database more than 52 million pictures in its Next Generation Identification facial recognition program by next year.
“One of our biggest concerns about NGI has been the fact that it will include non-criminal as well as criminal face images,” Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the EFF said in April. “We now know that FBI projects that by 2015, the database will include 4.3 million images taken for non-criminal purposes.”
According to Lynch, the agency could include in its database photos of Americans who applied for jobs or had non-criminal interactions with government that have traditionally required fingerprinting and background checks.
“Currently, if you apply for any type of job that requires fingerprinting or a background check, your prints are sent to and stored by the FBI in its civil print database. However, the FBI has never before collected a photograph along with those prints,” Lynch continued. “This is changing with NGI. Now an employer could require you to provide a ‘mug shot’ photo along with your fingerprints. If that’s the case, then the FBI will store both your face print and your fingerprints along with your biographic data.”
During yesterday’s hearing, Comey told lawmakers that the EFF’s concerns were unfounded, saying that the database will only contain criminal mug shots.
Pressed by Representative Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat who represents a district squarely situated in California’s Silicon Valley, Comey added that some non-criminals might be included if they apply for certain jobs or licenses.
“I think there is some circumstances in which when states send us records, they’ll send us pictures of people who are getting special driving licenses to transport children or explosive materials or something — but as I understand it those are not part of the searchable Next Generation Identification database,” he said.
The FBI director said that he even asked for an explanation from his underlings following the release of the EFF report when Lofgren cited the numbers put out by the electronic privacy organization.
“I saw some of the same media,” he said, “and that’s what led me to ask my folks: So what’s the deal with this? And the explanation to me was the pilot is mug shots, because those are repeatable, we can count on the quality of them, and they’re tied to criminal conduct, clearly, and so there was not a plan and there is not at present where we are going to add other non-mug shot photos. But again, if I’ve got that wrong I’ll fix it with you.”
Comey also said that he wasn’t sure if the 52 million figure is accurate.
“It’s my understanding that the contractor who is building this Next Generation database, a company called MorphoTrust, also built the State Department facial recognition database, which contains 244 million faces,” Lofgren pressed further. “Will your Next Generation Identification system be capable of importing the State Department records or searching the State Department records?”
Comey said that he didn’t know — but the FBI director did insist that the agency would not be importing photos from areas such as State driver license databases.
The FBI director’s light-on-facts testimony comes just weeks after The New York Timespublished a piece detailing how the National Security Agency scoops up and stores as many as 55,000 images that sleuths in the agency consider “facial recognition quality” from the communications they intercept each day.
The Times reported: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/nsa-collecting-millions-of-faces-from-web-images.html?_r=0
It is not clear how many people around the world, and how many Americans, might have been caught up in the effort. Neither federal privacy laws nor the nation’s surveillance laws provide specific protections for facial images. Given the N.S.A.’s foreign intelligence mission, much of the imagery would involve people overseas whose data was scooped up through cable taps, Internet hubs and satellite transmissions.
And despite halfhearted assurances from top officials that a similar strategy is being implemented in domestic intelligence and law enforcement, the legal gray area in how Federal privacy laws treat new technology like facial recognition is a big worry for privacy advocates. In addition, the FBI is not very far removed from the NSA’s activities thanks to the agency’s obscure Data Intercept Technology Unit.
As Foreign Policy reported in November:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/11/21/the_obscure_fbi_team_that_does_the_nsa_dirty_work
When the media and members of Congress say the NSA spies on Americans, what they really mean is that the FBI helps the NSA do it, providing a technical and legal infrastructure that permits the NSA, which by law collects foreign intelligence, to operate on U.S. soil. It’s the FBI, a domestic U.S. law enforcement agency, that collects digital information from at least nine American technology companies as part of the NSA’s Prism system. It was the FBI that petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order Verizon Business Network Services, one of the United States’ biggest telecom carriers for corporations, to hand over the call records of millions of its customers to the NSA.
In essence, Comey’s agency — acting as a proxy for the NSA — is already doing much of what he claims he doesn’t think his agency plans to do.
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