As a
modestly sized department — policing 2 million citizens with just
over 1,800 sworn officers — the San Bernardino Sheriff’s
Department doesn’t seem like it would be on the cutting edge of
surveillance technology. But the department has quietly become one of
the most productive nodes in a nationwide iris-scanning project,
collecting iris data from at least 200,000 arrestees over the last
two and a half years, according to documents obtained by The Verge.
In the early months of 2016, the department was collecting an average
of 189 iris scans each day.
San
Bernardino’s activity is part of a larger pilot program organized
by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, one that began as a simple
test of available technology but has quietly grown into something far
more ambitious. Since its launch in 2013, the program has stockpiled
iris scans from 434,000 arrestees, an FBI spokesperson confirmed.
To create
that pool of scans, the FBI has struck information-sharing agreements
with other agencies, including US Border Patrol, the Pentagon, and
local law enforcement departments. California has been most
aggressive about collecting scans, but agencies in Texas and Missouri
can also add to and search the system. The result amounts to a new
national biometric database that stretches the traditional boundaries
of a pilot program, while staying just outside the reach of privacy
mandates often required for such data-gathering projects.
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