FBI plans to create a database of criminals' faces are well under way. The $1billion scheme will help officials fight crime by matching surveillance photographs with images of known offenders. But privacy advocates have decried the wide-ranging project as 'a national photographic database' which will eventually encompass the innocent as well as criminals. The Next Generation Identification programme has been in the pipeline for several years and is now coming to fruition, according to the New Scientist. The plan involves using several hi-tech identification measures such as DNA analysis, voice recognition and iris scans to help fight crimes. But the centrepiece of the project is facial recognition, a technological breakthrough which the FBI says will be invaluable in solving and preventing crime in the future. The software has two primary uses - one is to allow officials to pick out an individual from a crowd to facilitate surveillance. The other new step is the ability to take a photograph and compare it against a database of faces which would in theory contain all former criminals, like fingerprint databases do today. Source: The Coming Crisis
