Criminal investigation, for thousands of years, consisted of the police chasing the criminals that they personally knew. If you had never come to the attention of the police, you were unlikely to be hauled in for a crime. The reverse was also true. As Captain Renault told his officers at the end of the movie Casablanca “Round up all the usual suspects.”

In 1879, Alphonse Bertillon advanced the theory that measurements taken from the rogues galleries of the day could prove a means of identifying criminal in the future. His theories have been discarded in favor of fingerprints, but the photographing of criminal that he tried to standardize continues in today’s mug shots. The photo identification is used in hundreds of millions of documents, from driver’s licenses to security badges.

FBI PHOTOGRAPHIC DATABASE

In an April 14 piece, the Electronic Freedom Foundation reveals the plans by the FBI to create a photographic database containing millions of images. The biometric database is called Next Generation Identification (NGI). It will contain fingerprints, eye scans, personal and biographic data as well as over 50 million photographs. The data it contains will be shared with other Federal agencies as well as tens of thousands of law enforcement agencies throughout the U.S.

EFF reports that by 2015 the database will contain over four million images of people who are not criminals. The NGI will link the existing criminal and non-criminal databases for the first time, making all the data available for search. That means that your photo, taken for employment purposes, may appear next to that of a rapist or serial killer.

It is a common joke among Americans that no one ever looks like their picture on their driver’s license. Photos on security badges or identification cards are also perceived as lousy pictures by the people who know best, those in the photos. Those are the photos that may be making their way into NGI. At your ugliest, do you look like a serial killer?

The EFF notes several problems with the system as currently proposed, problems that would be obvious to any serious amateur photographer. The quality of the photos will vary, due to lighting, background, image resolution, photo format and size. In a test of over 14,000 images submitted by Oregon, the photos were deemed “insufficient” in three of six categories assessed. The FBI report is heavily redacted.

The criticism also notes that the subject’s hair and pose have a great effect on the quality of the photo. In echos of 1879, the pose required for NGI is strictly limited and the areas of the head that must be visible are described in detail. No head coverings, no blood and no heavy makeup, just for starters.

Do we need a national biometric database? Do we need one limited to criminals? Is the ancient truism of “Garbage in, garbage out” going to be repeated by the FBI as it implements  Next Generation Identification? The answer to one of those questions, to my mind, is a resounding “yes!”

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Charles Simmins brings thirty years of accounting and management experience to his coverage of the news. An upstate New Yorker, he is a freelance journalist, former volunteer firefighter and EMT, and is owned by a wife and four cats.