New Department of Homeland Security biometrics system will identify people by scars, tattoos and palm prints

The cloud-based system will be able to identify people through scars and tattoos

The US Department of Homeland Security is working on a new biometric database intended to bring new analytics capabilities to the organisation's biometric operations.

The cloud-based system, dubbed Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology System (HART), should be able to identify people through their scars and body tattoos, as well as more conventional biometrics, such as palm prints.

HART will replace the 25-year-old Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT), which was deployed in 1994 to store fingerprints. Later, it was retrofitted to also store facial and iris records. Presently, it contains data covering more than 250 million individuals.

"When we get to HART, we will be better, faster, stronger," Patrick Nemeth, director of the DHS Office of Biometric Identity Management, said in an interview with Nextgov.

DHS is currently soliciting bids for the second phase of HART. In the first phase of the project, defence contractor Northrop Grumman was awarded a $95 million contract last year to streamline the IDENT database in preparation for transfer to HART.

After this concludes in 2021, the second phase of HART project will start, which will focus on the construction of the new database.

In addition to storing to fingerprints, facial images and irises, HART will contain palm prints, tattoos, scars and even voice files for hundreds of millions of individuals.

The new system will enable users to run a combined search across biometric types in order to increase the chances of a match. It will also include a testing environment to enable performance analyses without affecting everyday operations.

HART will run on Amazon Web Services' (AWS) GovCloud. AWS already hosts confidential data for multiple US government agencies, including NASA, the Department of Defence and the Central Intelligence Agency.

However, the DHS will continue to use IDENT for several years yet. The legacy system won't be officially retired until HART has been fully tested in the field.

Although DHS is currently trying to deploy more biometric software, many civil liberties groups and lawmakers in various countries have been calling for more regulations on use of the biometrics and facial recognition technology by the law enforcement agencies.

In July, the UK's House of Commons Science and Technology Committee urged the government to suspend what it described as "highly intrusive" trials on facial recognition technology.

The Committee warned about a lack of regulation over the use of facial recognition by police forces, which had been trialled by South Wales Police and the Metropolitan Police in London.

Earlier in May, a legal challenge was launched against police use of facial recognition technology in South Wales in the UK.

The action was brought by a former Liberal Democrat councillor, Ed Bridges, in a crowd-funded action against South Wales Police, supported by campaign groups Big Brother Watch and Liberty.