FBI Combines Civil & Criminal Fingerprints into One Searchable Databas

September 18, 2015 |
With Little Fanfare, FBI Ramps Up Biometrics Programs (Yet Again)—Part 1

FBI Combines Civil and Criminal Fingerprints into One Fully Searchable Database

Being a job seeker isn't a crime. But the FBI has made a big change in how it deals with fingerprints that might make it seem that way. For the first time, fingerprints and biographical information sent to the FBI for a background check will be stored and searched right along with fingerprints taken for criminal purposes.

The change, which the FBI revealed quietly in a February 2015 Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA), means that if you ever have your fingerprints taken for licensing or for a background check, they will most likely end up living indefinitely in the FBI's NGI database. They'll be searched thousands of times a day by law enforcement agencies across the country—even if your prints didn't match any criminal records when they were first submitted to the system.

This is the first time the FBI has allowed routine criminal searches of its civil fingerprint data. Although employers and certifying agencies have submitted prints to the FBI for decades, the FBI says it rarely retained these non-criminal prints. And even when it did retain prints in the past, they “were not readily accessible or searchable.” Now, not only will these prints—and the biographical data included with them—be available to any law enforcement agent who wants to look for them, they will be searched as a matter of course along with all prints collected for a clearly criminal purpose (like upon arrest or at time of booking).

This change will impact a broad swath of Americans. It's not just prospective police officers or childcare workers who have to submit to fingerprint background checks. In Texas, for example, you'll need to give the government your prints if you want to be an engineer, doctor, realtor, stockbroker, attorney, or even an architect. The California Department of Justice says it submits 1.2 million sets of civil prints to the FBI annually. And, since 1953, all jobs with the federal government have required a fingerprint check—not just for jobs requiring a security clearance, but even for part-time food service workers, student interns, designers, customer service representatives, and maintenance workers.

Read the rest here:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/l … ain-part-1