It's a not-so-subtle change from a life in which you "knew pretty much everyone" in your town council. A friendly warning at a stop sign is no longer a friendly warning. The feds are on patrol. They already know the color of your underpants and may be expected to comment on the artistry of your tats.
The FBI has invested considerable energy in recent months in marketing a massive new biometric database to local cops, whom the agency will rely on to help feed it billions of fingerprints, palm prints, mug shots, iris scans and images of scars, tattoos and other identifiers. ...
... It took senior FBI consultant Peter Fagan just nine words this week to capture the ambitious scope of the agency’s aims with the new system, which is gradually replacing traditional fingerprint identification with facial recognition and other biometric identifier technology.
“What happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas anymore,” Fagan told a roomful of police executives at the annual International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference in Orlando on Tuesday.
He said that reaching the FBI’s goal of better tracking criminal suspects from town to town depends on local cops’ ability to adopt increasingly sophisticated new technologies and to share their data with federal law enforcement. He urged police to begin to “pack the record[s]” by collecting as many high-quality biometric identifiers from arrested criminal suspects as possible.
“We’re not only talking mug shots,” he said. “We’re talking scars, marks, tattoos and other descriptors. You can take up to 25 images [per arrest]. It used to be 10, but now you can take up to 25,” he said. “The upside is that every mug shot you collect is going to be searched against an unsolved crime.” ...AlJazeera
Congratulations! You're on candid... You're in the FBI's biometric database. You are a potential perp already. Guilty until exonerated by that tiny "Howdy!" tattoed on your thigh.
And the guy running the FBI is beginning to sound like a sicko nutcase.
Even as outgoing U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced a broad new Department of Justice review of policing tactics, training and techniques at the conference on Monday and urged cops not to let racial tensions be “swept under the rug” in places like Ferguson, Missouri — where the fatal August shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer sparked weeks of protests — FBI Director James Comey vividly defended law enforcement on another hot-button policing issue that re-emerged from the long Missouri summer: the militarization of local police.
“I know that this debate and some of the bumper-stickering of it has discouraged many of you, because you know in your gut the dangers that your folks face when they put on the uniform and the badge to go out and do their job each day,” he said.
“We tell a lie to our children … that monsters aren’t real,” Comey said. “Monsters are real. Monsters are barricaded inside apartments waiting for law enforcement to respond so they can fire rounds that will pierce ballistic vests. Monsters are real, and they are equipped with equipment designed to harm innocent people.” ...Al Jazeera
Whew!
