## 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 1970 s, AFIS system design has been left to hardware and software vendors resulting in differing approaches to algorithm coding in recognizing images. T he varying approach es 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 h as 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 f ingerprint 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 system s , called AFIS, which use image recogniti on 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 maker s and practitioners are aware of the importance of AFIS interoperability and how to achieve it , including its potential impact on privacy and state’srights issues

. This should include proper governance

, funding incentives , and the assignment of

an approp riate 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 Extende d 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 F ederal AFIS systems require

, collect ion and report ing 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 restrict ions 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.