US watchdog is critical of FBI database with 412 million photos
The US Government Accountability Office has conducted an investigation into an FBI photo database, which contains 411.9 million photos. The watchdog is critical of, among other things, the accuracy of the database and the information provided by the FBI.
In the study, the watchdog elaborates on the criticisms. For example, the FBI has not conducted sufficient research into the accuracy of the system that identifies people on the basis of photos from the database. As a result, false positives can occur, in which a person is incorrectly identified. A lawyer from the American civil rights organization EFF told The Guardian that the results have an accuracy of 80 to 85 percent and are therefore very inaccurate.
The FBI should also have better estimate the consequences of using the system for the privacy of citizens, the watchdog says in the investigation report. By providing insufficient information, it was impossible for citizens to know what is being done with their personal data. The EFF writes that it is legally required to conduct a privacy impact assessment, but this only happened seven years after the FBI program in question was expanded. The organization adds that the timing of the Government Accountability Office’s findings is very important, as the FBI attempted to partially exempt its biometrics database from privacy regulations in late May.
The FBI’s system is divided into several parts. First, there’s the NGI-IPS, which stores more than 30 million photos used by the FBI and local law enforcement units to identify individuals. In addition, the FBI appears to have a separate internal department called FACE. It provides facial recognition services to ongoing FBI investigations. FACE has access not only to the NGI-IPS, but also to the databases of the US Departments of State and Defense, in addition to data from 16 states. All these databases also have their own facial recognition systems.
This gives access to a total of 411.9 million photos, which come from passports, police photos and driver’s licenses, among other things.