The agency is asking private biometric contractors how to build an integrated platform that would let workers search faces and fingerprints in large government databases already filled with biometrics collected in a variety of contexts. The goal is to connect components including Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Secret Service and DHS headquarters, replacing a patchwork of tools that don’t easily share data.
The system will support surveillance, detention or removal operations and comes as DHS is pushing biometric surveillance far beyond ports of entry and into the hands of intelligence units and undercover agents operating hundreds of miles from the border.
Records show DHS is trying to buy a single “matching engine” that could take different types of biometrics — faces, fingerprints, iris scans and more — and run them through a single backend, giving multiple DHS agencies a shared system. In theory, this means the platform will handle both identity checks and investigative searches.
Specifically for facial recognition, identity verification means that the system compares a photograph to a single stored record and gives a yes-or-no answer based on similarity. For detection, it searches a large database and returns a ranked list of faces that look closest to a human for review, rather than making independent calls.
Both types of searches come with real technical limitations. In identity checks, the systems are more sensitive, and therefore less likely to falsely flag an innocent person. However, they will fail to identify the match when the presented image is slightly blurry, angular or old. For investigative searches, the cutoff is significantly lower, and while the system is more likely to include the right person somewhere in the results, it also produces many more false positives that require human review.
The documents make clear that DHS wants to control how strict or permissive the match should be, depending on the context.
The department also wants the system to be directly connected to its existing infrastructure. Contractors will be expected to connect Matcher to existing biometric sensors, enrollment systems, and data repositories so that information collected in one DHS component can be searched against records maintained by another.
It is unclear how practical this is. Various DHS agencies have purchased their biometric systems from different companies over the years. Each system turns a face or fingerprint into a series of numbers, but many are designed to work only with the specific software that created them.
In practice, this means that a new department-wide search tool can’t simply “flip the switch” and make everything compatible. DHS would likely have to convert old records to a common format, reconstruct them using a new algorithm, or create software bridges that translate between the systems. All of these methods take time and money, and each can impact speed and accuracy.
At the scale that DHS is proposing – potentially billions of records – even small compatibility gaps could turn into big problems.
The documents also contain a placeholder indicating that DHS wants to include voiceprint analysis, but does not contain any detailed plans for how they would be collected, stored or searched. The agency previously used voiceprints in its “Alternative to Detention” program, which allowed immigrants to remain in their communities but required them to submit to intensive monitoring, including GPS ankle trackers and regular check-ins that confirmed their identities using biometric voiceprints.
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