FBI analyzes 200,000 fingerprints per day

    Every time you enter the United States, you are fingerprinted at the airport using a wireless scanner. Fingerprints are instantly transferred to a special laboratory of the FBI, where at the same second they are run through the database.



    CrimeTracker 10 reporter managed to visit this secret lab. The article provides quite interesting statistics on the volume of work that the FBI supercomputers have to perform. All illustrations in this text are shots taken in the laboratory.



    A huge fingerprint repository covers the area of ​​two football stadiums. Fingerprints of 60 million people are stored there, including 600,000 samples whose owners have not yet been identified (how many criminals are out there?).







    Naturally, all these samples are in digital form, but the paper is still stored just in case. Each new fingerprint system runs through a digital database with samples.



    FBI agents when examining a crime scene now use special wireless fingerprint scanners, which immediately send samples to the laboratory. Every day, the system receives 200,000 fingerprint sets from operational services, which must be instantly analyzed. The run speed of each sample is up to seven seconds.



    Each set usually has ten fingers, so the number of fingerprints analyzed is approximately two million. If you count the number of comparisons, then it is 600 billion per day.



    Thanks to computer fingerprint analysis, the police make 15,000 arrests per month.



    It is hard to imagine how large this database will grow if you add retinal scans, facial biometric data and other biometric information. The work on filling this database is already in full swing. By the way, additional databases for the recognition of tattoos and wrist prints are simultaneously being filled with material.



    via Wired

    Also popular now: