FBI Building Vast Database of Iris, Face and Fingerprint Scans - Via Threat Level:

The FBI is building what is being called the world's largest database of biometric data that will include face, fingerprint, iris and palm scans in order to identify and catch criminals/terrorists.

But what's really interesting about this story from the Washington Post's Ellen Nakashima is that the FBI plans to offer a service to employers that will involve retaining the fingerprints of any employees on whom an employer has conducted a criminal background check. Ordinarily, the FBI destroys or returns the fingerprint records that employers send it when conducting a background check. But now the FBI is offering to store those prints on behalf of employers and then notify the employer if an employee later gets arrested for committing a crime.

This sounds like the kind of service you'd expect from a private datamining company like Choicepoint, not from a law enforcement agency that's funded with tax dollars. After all, courts and prosecutors don't notify employers when their workers are convicted of crimes, yet the FBI is offering to alert employers simply when an employee is arrested for a crime -- whether or not the employee is ever charged or convicted of the crime. The article doesn't say whether the FBI would limit its alerts to certain kinds of crimes.

More than 55 percent of the search requests now are made for background checks on civilians in sensitive positions in the federal government, and jobs that involve children and the elderly, Bush said. Currently those prints are destroyed or returned when the checks are completed. But the FBI is planning a "rap-back" service, under which employers could ask the FBI to keep employees' fingerprints in the database, subject to state privacy laws, so that if that employees are ever arrested or charged with a crime, the employers would be notified.

A cynic might wonder whether the FBI's "rap-back" service is simply a means for the agency to retain fingerprint records that they'd normally have to destroy or return to employers.

(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)