Today, our friends over at the Washington Times picked up on a story first broke by the U.K.’s Guardian concerning a plan to link FBI biometric data with data collected by the Brits. The British federal law enforcement has voiced openly their privacy concerns over such a system and I doubt it will be popular, politically, to become bedfellows with the American FBI in such a public manner. However, senior British officials acknowledged they will be in Washington this week to discuss the program called, “Server in the Sky.”
I reported earlier in December about a program being built by the FBI that was going to be the worlds “largest computer database of peoples’ physical characteristics,” called Next Generation Identification. If you remember correctly, Next Generation is to be used principally for domestic biometric data and accessed by federal, state and local law enforcement, Server in the Sky will be its international counterpart.
The British IDENT1 is the UK police fingerprint computer that would be linked with the FBI’s international server. The Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders are also being vetted for inclusion in the Server in the Sky program. The Guardian story reports that the FBI is proposing a three-tiered system of tracking based on their known level of involvement. The paper also points out several points of anxiety for personal privacy advocates including the recent embarrassing data losses within the UK government and suspect levels of accuracy, including one case where “an arrest for a terror offence by US investigators used what turned out to be misidentified fingerprint matches.”
Still, Thomas Bush, assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division who is also tasked with overseeing Next Generation, said, “The British would decide what information they would want to share. They ultimately have the responsibility for that. Same with our information.”
The FBI is clearly trying to monopolize and set the standards for the systems international law enforcement will use to tell them who is and who is not a terrorist. But time will tell to see exactly how much pressure the FBI is able to leverage over the Brits and we’ll have to keep a sharp eye on who gets the lucrative contracts being drawn up at this very moment. Remember, Northrop Grumman holds the current contract to the UK’s system and Next Generation has yet to unload its $1 billion plus contract. Have no fear, though, we’ll be your eye in the sky.
