Homeland Security wants one system to search faces and fingerprints across multiple agencies, replacing separate tools.
Washington, DC: The Department of Homeland Security wants to build one system that can search faces, fingerprints, and other body measurements across all its agencies. This includes Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, airport security, and other parts of the department.
Right now, each agency uses its own separate tools that don’t share information well. The new plan would create one shared system where officers can check identities or investigate cases using the same platform. This means someone’s picture taken at an airport could be checked against records from border crossings or investigations.
The system would work in two main ways. For checking if someone is who they say they are, like at passport control, results would be very strict to avoid mistakes. But for investigations, where officers need to find possible matches from many records, the system would be more flexible and allow more choices that humans must then review.
Making this work is complicated because different agencies have collected information over many years using different methods. Some records might need to be converted or translated between systems to work together. The department also wants to add voice recognition technology, though details about how this would work are still being planned.