EXCLUSIVE: This Is How the U.S. Military’s Massive Facial Recognition System Works
By: Dave Gershgorn
Tags: Privacy, Artificial Intelligence, Military, Facial Recognition, Industry

Over the last 15 years, the United States military has developed a new addition to its arsenal. The weapon is deployed around the world, largely invisible, and grows more powerful by the day.

That weapon is a vast database, packed with millions of images of faces, irises, fingerprints, and DNA data — a biometric dragnet of anyone who has come in contact with the U.S. military abroad. The 7.4 million identities in the database range from suspected terrorists in active military zones to allied soldiers training with U.S. forces.

“Denying our adversaries anonymity allows us to focus our lethality. It’s like ripping the camouflage netting off the enemy ammunition dump,” wrote Glenn Krizay, director of the Defense Forensics and Biometrics Agency, in notes obtained by OneZero. The Defense Forensics and Biometrics Agency (DFBA) is tasked with overseeing the database, known officially as the Automated Biometric Information System (ABIS).

DFBA and its ABIS database have received little scrutiny or press given the central role they play in U.S. military’s intelligence operations. But a newly obtained presentation and notes written by the DFBA’s director, Krizay, reveals how the organization functions and how biometric identification has been used to identify non-U.S. citizens on the battlefield thousands of times in the first half of 2019 alone. ABIS also allows military branches to flag individuals of interest, putting them on a so-called “Biometrically Enabled Watch List” (BEWL). Once flagged, these individuals can be identified through surveillance systems on battlefields, near borders around the world, and on military bases.

“It allows us to decide and act with greater focus, and if needed, lethality.”

The presentation also sheds light on how military, state, and local law enforcement biometrics systems are linked. According to Krizay’s presentation, ABIS is connected to the FBI’s biometric database, which is in turn connected to databases used by state and local law enforcement. Ultimately, that means that the U.S. military can readily search against biometric data of U.S. citizens and cataloged non-citizens. The DFBA is also currently working to connect its data to the Department of Homeland Security’s biometric database. The network will ultimately amount to a global surveillance system. In his notes, Krizay outlines a potential scenario in which data from a suspect in Detroit would be run against data collected from “some mountaintop in Asia.”

The documents, which are embedded in full below, were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. These documents were presented earlier this year at a closed-door defense biometrics conference known as the Identity Management Symposium.

ABIS is the result of a massive investment into biometrics by the U.S. military. According to federal procurement records analyzed by OneZero, the U.S. military has invested more than $345 million in biometric database technology in the last 10 years. Leidos, a defense contractor that primarily focuses on information technology, currently manages the database in question. Ideal Innovations Incorporated operates a subsection of the database designed to manage activity in Afghanistan, according to documents obtained by OneZero through a separate FOIA request.

These contracts, combined with revelations surrounding the military’s massive biometric database initiatives, paint an alarming picture: A large and quickly growing network of surveillance systems operated by the U.S. military and present anywhere the U.S. has deployed troops, vacuuming up biometric data on millions of unsuspecting individuals.