By Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com The FBI built a sophisticated database to help catch serial killers and rapists but hardly anyone used it since its launch more than three decades ago, Newsweek reports. The idea was to help local, state and federal law enforcement discern behavioral patterns, like the type of knife used or how a…
Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com The FBI’s plan to soon launch its facial recognition system has worried civil liberties advocates because the bureau won’t say whether it has any limits on its use. The Huffington Post reports that the FBI plans to soon use 52 million photos in its biometric database, but where those photos came from…
Bill Piper The Seattle Times Note: Piper is the director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance This year is the 40th anniversary of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Already plagued by scandals, the agency has recently been revealed to be collaborating with the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency to spy on…
Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com A secret court played a major role in the NSA’s ability to gather phone data on millions of Americans, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court decided in the mid-2000s to broaden the definition of “relevant,” which allowed the collection of millions of people’s phone records. The information includes…
Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com The FBI is scouring state databases of driver’s license photos to search for face matches of criminals, WND reports. “A probe photo refers to the photo of the subject of an active FBI investigation that is submitted for search against a photo repository,” states the FBI’s agreement with Illinois, which is nearly…
Steve Neavling ticklthewire.com U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham sharply criticized law enforcement’s information-sharing system during the probe into the deadly Boston Marathon bombings, Business Insider reports. Graham said the system should have picked up on the suspicious activity of bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Graham also urged federal agencies to “up our game.” “When one of these…
Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com The ATF is hoping to acquire a mega database that would allow agents to quickly draw connections between suspects’ names, phone numbers, social security numbers and utility bills, the Huffington Post reports. As it is, agents must analyze data largely by hand because the information is stored in separate locations, consuming time…
Steve Neavling ticklethewire.com The FBI is preparing its newest weapon against crime – a $1 billion national facial recognition system. The Next Generation Identification program, which is expected to be rolled out nationwide by 2014, matches surveillance images of known criminals, reports CNET. The system is designed to compare a photo to the FBI’s database of…
