A new internet-based law enforcement tool uses artificial intelligence technology to allow police departments to establish links quickly among their own files and to those of other departments.
The United States is compiling digital dossiers of the irises, fingerprints, faces and voices of terrorism suspects and using the information to track their movements and screen foreigners trying to enter the country.
To combat terrorism, federal officials are planning a massive intelligence-gathering system that will ultimately combine more than $100 million in new funding, powerful new terrorism laws, an expanded role for local police and state-of-the-art computer networks that will link federal agents with thousands of police departments.
After months of criticism that they do not work well together, the CIA and FBI have begun jointly developing a new supercomputer system designed to improve their ability to both cull and share information.
Experts are warning that the real technological challenge behind a national identification system isn't the flashy iris scanning, face recognizing or fingerprinting on the front end, its the database. The best biometric technology is of little use without a central database and those vast databases are notoriously mistake-prone, difficult to secure, open to abuse, and expensive to compile and operate.