Intellectual Property Law

FBI Lab Processes 600 Billion Fingerprint Sets a Day

By Kim Zetter

An underground fingerprint lab in West Virginia is the nexus point for every crime committed in the country and even for some committed overseas.

The FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services building in Clarksburg houses a multi-billion-dollar computer system that processes 600 billion fingerprint sets a day, according to a CBS news reporter who visited the lab. The prints come in 24-hours-a-day from crime scenes around the country as well as from overseas, such as in Iraq where prints lifted from IED explosives are sent to CJIS to match against known terrorist suspects.

Agents in the field use wireless scanners to transmit fingerprint samples to the center, where matches can be returned as quickly as seven seconds.

The facility also processes fingerprint searches on travelers scanned at border entry points under the U.S. Visit program, as well as on teachers, day-care center employees, government workers and others who must undergo background checks for their jobs.

The building, the size of two football stadiums, stores about 60 million sets of fingerprints, including 600,000 prints lifted from crime scenes belonging to as-yet-unidentified suspects.

From the large archive, authorities are able to match and identify about 15,000 wanted suspects per month. Prints lifted from a beer can, VCR and gun magazine clip helped solve three separate murder cases recently. A fingerprint that a suspect known as the “Craigslist killer” left on the wall of a hotel where he allegedly murdered a woman he met on the web site helped authorities connect him to a second unsolved murder.

West Virginia University students are helping the FBI add biometric records to the database — such as iris and face scans — and are developing the first nationwide search system for matching palm prints as well as tattoos.

Full post as published by Threat Level on July 23, 2009 (boomark / email).