Privacy advocates won a lawsuit demanding information on the FBI’s biometric identification program, “Next Generation Identification” (NGI). A federal judge has now awarded the privacy group $20,000 in legal fees and ruled that the public has an interest in obtaining information on the program, the National Journal reported.
NGI, the FBI’s attempt to make sci-fi a reality, creates an enormous database of iris scans, DNA profiles, voice identification profiles, palm prints, pictures, and fingerprints. Privacy advocates fear that this will result in the biometric information of millions of innocent individuals being readily shared among multiple state, local, federal, and international agencies, without their knowledge.
The program fully launched in September, but hasn’t had an internal review in six years. Its last Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) was conducted in 2008, and highlighted some serious concerns, like “the risk that the electronic search process may not be sufficiently reliable to accurately locate other photos of the same identity, resulting in an unacceptable percentage of misidentifications.”
Multiple groups have lobbied the FBI to conduct another review, but they have failed to do so. In a letter to Eric Holder signed by over 30 groups, including the ACLU and NAACP, the signers note that NGI has “undergone a radical transformation” since the outdated 2008 review, and that the program “could, in the future, allow us to be monitored and tracked in unprecedented ways.”
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has repeatedly tried to pry information on the program out of the FBI, and resorted to a lawsuit when the FBI failed to comply with their Freedom of Information Act requests.
The lawsuit forced the FBI to reveal hundreds of pages of documents, including a 2010 report on what kind of “success” would be required from NGI’s technology. The FBI’s definition of “success” was if the correct name appeared anywhere in a list of 50 suspects. And even under that generous definition, the program is still allowed to fail up to 20 percent of the time.
FOIA law states that groups can be awarded legal fees from the United States government if they “substantially prevail” in their lawsuit. EPIC requested $22,124 in fees, but the FBI only wanted to give them $350 for filing the complaint.
The court held that EPIC substantially prevailed in their lawsuit, and awarded their fees.
The FBI argued that EPIC’s lawsuit did not benefit the public, but the judge’s opinion countered that “There can be little dispute that the general public has a genuine, tangible interest in a system designed to store and manipulate significant quantities of its own biometric data, particularly given the great numbers of people from whom such data will be gathered.”
