CIA is Secretly Collecting Bulk Data Pertaining to Americans

They want your digital fingerprint.

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The Next Generation Identification (NGI) system is a fast, accurate, and contactless biometric identification option for U.S. intelligence and law enforcement. It was created by the FBI in order to expand the capabilities of the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), which identifies subjects by their fingerprints and looks up their criminal history. The NGI system augmented simply looking at fingerprints- it has advanced lookup capabilities.

The identification data of NGI is amazing, since it merged all the original fingerprint data from the IAFIS database, which houses over 100 million individual records, with new biometric data, including palm prints, iris scans and face recognition records.

Here is the story:

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Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) said in a letter that was partly declassified Thursday that the CIA has been collecting data in bulk in a secret program that could impact Americans' privacy.

"It has done so entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes with FISA collection," they continued, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. "This basic fact has been kept from the public and from Congress. Until the PCLOB report was delivered last month, the nature and full extent of the CIA's collection was withheld even from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence."

"Since 2015, for example, Mitre has been working on technologies for the FBI to capture fingerprints from images on social media platforms. It has also helped the FBI to develop facial recognition technology and to build the latter’s Next Generation Identification platform, a repository of a range of biometric data. And Mitre has provided technical support to US Customs and Border Protection for its Rapid DNA screening technology."

"Mitre has even done work for the CIA to examine whether an individual’s body odor changes when they are lying, a truly novel biometric avenue. And the research suggested that odor biometrics may indeed help to indicate deception."

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NBC News

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The Hill

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The Wall Street Journal

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It never stops.