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FBI Turns Drivers' License Pictures into Criminal Line-Up

by Terrence O'Brien on October 14, 2009 at 06:10 PM

Imagine if just by getting a driver's license, you were entering yourself into an unofficial, virtual lineup that police would scour for suspects. Well, if you live in North Carolina, that scenario is already reality. Created by the FBI, a current test program uses facial recognition technology to compare photos of suspects with the state's drivers' license database.

According to USA Today, the new system was used earlier this year to track down a man named Rodolfo Corrales, who had been suspected of double homicide in California. Authorities learned that he had fled to North Carolina, so they took photos of him, dating from 1991, to Raleigh, N.C. There, software was used to analyze various facial features (such as chin and nose width) and sort through the state's 30 million license photos. The search turned up dozens of images resembling those of Corrales. Analysts reviewed the results, finding a man who was calling himself Jose Solis. Eventually, he was positively identified as Corrales and arrested.

The FBI is considering plans to take the system nationwide, but predictably (and understandably) this has raised flags for privacy advocates like Christopher Calabrese of the ACLU. Authorities are sensitive to these concerns, and although they haven't tabled wider use of facial recognition, they have not announced any timetable for implementation. Interestingly, drivers' license photos would not be transferred to federal systems. Instead, the FBI would have to go to individual states, and on a case by case basis, in order to gain access to the databases.

States' rights notwithstanding, we're not terribly comfortable with our pictures going into a line-up just because we sit behind a steering wheel. [From: USA Today]

Tags: dmv, drivers license, DriversLicense, facial recognition, FacialRecognition, fbi, law enforcement, LawEnforcement, top

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