The Latest in IT Security

The FBI is currently building a massive facial recognition database, and now we have an idea of just how big that database is. According to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the FBIs Next Generation Identification (NGI) database will contain a whopping 52 million photos by 2015, up significantly from the 16 million the database contained in the middle of 2013. Beyond the size of the database, the documents obtained by EFFs Freedom of Information Act requests also showed that database includes 4.3 million images obtained for non-criminal purposes. Its not clear exactly where these non-criminal photos came from, but currently jobs that require a background check or fingerprinting send those prints to the FBI for its civil database.