US Marines Fighting For Your Freedom, And Biometric ID's For All

09-27-2010 • wired.com

With these biometric tools, the Marines are planning to recruit new cops who have no ties to tribal warlords. “We know there are some shadow police and some militia-type police,” Lt. Col. Ray Hall, the Marine commander, said. “Once we go through the vetting process, we'll have everybody screened … so that problem should go away.” That means scanning every new recruit's unique iris “eye prints,” logging their thumb prints and feeding it all into a growing, but still very spotty, national database linked to criminal and intelligence records. If a cop has any known warlord ties, he's disqualified from serving. CIA teams used FBI biometrics while hunting for known Al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan in 2001, and since then, the military has gathered data on almost every Afghan it comes in regular contact with. There's one more problem. Not all the military databases can talk to one another. “We haven't standardized,” said Larry Schneider, a Northrop Grumman VP who last year was working on collapsing many biometrics systems into just one. Until everyone is looking at the same data, seditious Afghan cops will probably keep falling through the cracks.