NATIONAL COMMISSION ON

FORENSIC SCIENCE

Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS)

Interoperability

Type of Work Product

Directive recommendation developed by the Interim Solutions Subcommittee

Recommendation

The US Attorney General should support, recommend and fund interoperability of Automated 

Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) as a national effort to improve public safety.

Statement of the Issue

Since the 1970s, AFIS system design has been left to hardware and software vendors resulting in 

differing approaches to algorithm coding in recognizing images. The varying approaches to 

algorithm coding developed by vendors through the free market has resulted in incompatible 

proprietary systems. This lack of “interoperability” has created sophisticated, stand-alone AFIS 

systems that cannot share data.

Background

For over a century, the criminal justice system has relied on fingerprint technology to support 

public safety throughout the world to identify individuals suspected in criminal and terrorist 

events, among other uses. During a criminal investigation, latent fingerprints located, developed,

and recovered from a crime scene are compared with fingerprint records of known individuals. 

Latent fingerprints from unknown sources, whether left behind as complete or partial fingerprints, 

can be searched with today’s technology in an automated, electronic systems, called AFIS, which 

use image recognition algorithms that produce a list of potential candidates that share similar 

fingerprint features.

When true interoperability is achieved, AFIS systems will have technical compatibility standards, 

interagency network connectivity, and quality assurance within and between systems. The lack of 

interoperability has not been hampered for technical reasons; it has been policy and practice that 

have prevented true interoperability.

Recommended Implementation Strategy

The US Attorney General should support, recommend, and fund interoperability through 

collaboration, education, and outreach. The US Attorney General, with guidance from the 

National Commission on Forensic Science as well as the Organization of Scientific Area 

Committees, should ensure that decision makers and practitioners are aware of the importance of 

AFIS interoperability and how to achieve it, including its potential impact on privacy and state’s 
rights issues. This should include proper governance, funding incentives, and the assignment of 

an appropriate DOJ entity for implementation responsibility.

1) Standards for Interoperability

a. Require that any AFIS system that is acquired using federal funding meet interoperability 

standards using the Extended Feature Set (EFS), the Latent Interoperability Transmission 

Specification (LITS), and/or any interoperability standards developed in the future.

b. Make sufficient funds available to support procurement or upgrades of interoperable AFIS

systems so that true interoperability can be achieved by October 1, 2020.

c. Recommend that future state and local AFIS systems consider, and Federal AFIS systems 

require, collection and reporting of data in a standard format (to be defined by the Organization of 

Scientific Area Committees (OSAC))

2) Interagency Connectivity

a. Review and revise policies to ease restrictions to state and local agencies’ access to the 

Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Next Generation Identification System (FBI NGI).

b. Direct that studies or pilot programs be conducted to assess the value of giving more 

agencies (whether federal, state or local) direct access to Department of Defense and Department 

of Homeland Security fingerprint databases.

3) Quality Assurance

Develop conformance testing criteria in collaboration with OSAC to verify AFIS system 

compliance to standards and make that a criterion for interagency connectivity.