Adding to Public Discourse > Privacy advocates worry that a system now focused on immigrants and their family members could eventually be expanded to the broader public. “There’s no basis in history for being sanguine about the idea that once these things are trialed on foreigners, who have few legal rights anyway, and where the American public won’t complain,” said Edward Hasbrouck, a travel and privacy expert, “that they will then become the new normal for U.S. citizens as well.”
DHS Plans to Start Collecting Eye Scans and DNA — With the Help of Defense Contractors
As the agency plans to collect more biometrics, including from U.S. citizens, Northrop Grumman is helping build the infrastructure.
Through a little-discussed potential bureaucratic rule change, the Department of Homeland Security is planning to collect unprecedented levels of biometric information from immigration applicants and their sponsors — including U.S. citizens. While some types of applicants have long been required to submit photographs and fingerprints, a rule currently under consideration would require practically everyone applying for any kind of status, or detained by immigration enforcement agents, to provide iris scans, voiceprints and palmprints, and, in some cases, DNA samples. A tangled web of defense and surveillance contractors, which operate with little public oversight, have already begun to build the infrastructure that would be needed to store these records.
After proposing the rule in September, DHS is currently reviewing, and must respond to, thousands of comments it received during the 30-day period in which the public could weigh in. The agency had signaled that the proposal would be coming when it announced last year that it would be retiring its legacy Automated Biometric Identification System, or IDENT, and replacing it with the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology framework — stating explicitly that one of its objectives was to collect more types of biometric data and make searching and matching easier. Where HART was the vessel, the new proposed rule is the means of collecting all the new data types to populate it.
Any potential contractors tasked with rolling out the new data collection infrastructure and management won’t be decided until after the rule is finalized, but a look at the companies currently working on building out DHS’s already vast biometrics capabilities is instructive . . .
In mid-November, Homeland Security issued another proposed biometrics rule, dealing with the CBP’s long-planned rollout of a system to run facial recognition on everyone entering or leaving the country. While there have been pilot programs for the congressionally mandated scheme for some time, with the entry portion of the project almost fully implemented, the new rules would require effectively every noncitizen to be photographed both when arriving in and departing the United States. U.S. citizens would technically be allowed to opt out, but in practice they haven’t always been able to do so even under the current rules. Over 180,000 of the very same images taken as part of this process have also already been leaked by the breach of a CBP contractor’s system.
The rule is undergoing a short public comment period slated to end on December 21. .
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