Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI Crime News
“We are contacting our partners across the country and encouraging them to initiate this program,” said Special Agent Scott Rago, who heads the Biometric Services Section in the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division (CJIS). “Having the ability where they don’t have to have contact with the individual—it just takes a second or two to look into the device and have your eyes captured and you get a response within a minute—it’s a very, very positive system.”
To date, the iris image repository contains 1.38 million enrollments submitted from federal, state, and local databases after they were collected during criminal bookings, incarcerations, or other legal proceedings. The iris images won’t replace fingerprints, which the FBI has collected and analyzed for nearly a century; they are a secondary biometric, or supplement, to the traditional collection of 10-finger prints and palm prints.
The Bureau’s fingerprint database—Next Generation Identification—contains more than 70 million prints of criminal subjects and more than 30 million civil fingerprints from background checks.
Rago said he hopes to see the iris image database grow to where it can make an impact on solving cases.
During the pilot period, which began in September 2013, several correctional systems incorporated iris collection into their processes, which enabled staff to get positive identifications—without physical contact—on inmates as they transferred in and out of facilities. The seven-year pilot enabled the FBI to build the criminal iris repository as well as assess privacy policies, best practices, and other requirements.
In the new system, so-called probe images of a subject’s left and right irises are captured at close range in a controlled setting. The images can then be searched against all the irises in the FBI’s repository. The process takes about a minute. A match will return the subject’s biographic data along with their criminal record, select National Crime Information Center record data, and, in some cases, a mug shot.
The Iris Service is the latest addition to the Bureau’s NGI System, which is the world’s largest and most efficient electronic repository of biometric and criminal information. In addition to repositories for irises and fingerprints, NGI includes 30 million criminal mugshots that law enforcement partners can search against.
Rago said he expects the NGI Iris Service to appeal to police and correctional workers because it’s fast, easy to use, and hands-off.
“In the future, once the repository has grown to a good sample size, you can imagine a police officer on a traffic stop using the mobile iris camera capability,” Rago said. “If someone’s being difficult, they don’t even have to put their hands on them. It’s, ‘Look at me,’ and capture the iris. They can run the information and get a response.”