DHS Wants a Single Search Engine to Flag Faces and Fingerprints Across Agencies
The Department of Homeland Security is moving to consolidate its facial recognition and other biometric technologies into a single system capable of matching faces, fingerprints, iris scans and other identifiers collected by its law enforcement agencies, according to records reviewed by WIRED.
The agency is asking private biometrics contractors how to create a unified platform that would allow employees to search for faces and fingerprints in large government databases already filled with biometric data collected in different contexts. The goal is to connect components such as Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Transportation Security Administration, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Secret Service and DHS Headquarters, replacing a patchwork of tools that don’t allow for easy data sharing.
The system would support watchlisting, detention or deportation operations and comes as DHS pushes biometric surveillance well beyond ports of entry and into the hands of intelligence units and masked agents operating hundreds of miles from the border.
Records show that DHS is trying to purchase a single “matching engine” that can take different types of biometric data (faces, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.) and run them through the same backend, giving multiple DHS agencies a shared system. In theory, this means that the platform would handle both identity checks and investigative searches.
For facial recognition specifically, identity verification means the system compares a photo to a single stored record and returns a yes or no answer based on similarity. For surveys, it searches a large database and returns a ranked list of the closest faces for a human to review instead of making an independent call.
Both types of research have real technical limitations. During identity checks, systems are more sensitive and are therefore less likely to falsely flag an innocent person. However, they will fail to identify a match when the submitted photo is slightly blurry, skewed, or out of date. For investigative searches, the threshold is considerably lower and, while the system is more likely to include the right person somewhere in the results, it also produces many more false positives that require human review.
The documents make it clear that DHS wants to control how strict or permissive a match is, depending on the context.
The ministry also wants the system to be connected directly to its existing infrastructure. Contractors should connect the comparator to current biometric sensors, enrollment systems, and data repositories so that information collected in one DHS component can be searched in records held by another.
It is unclear to what extent this is feasible. Different DHS agencies have purchased their biometric systems from different companies for many years. Each system turns a face or fingerprint into a string of numbers, but many are designed only to work with the specific software that created them.
In practice, this means that a new department-wide search tool cannot simply “push a button” and make everything compatible. DHS will likely need to convert old records to a common format, reconstruct them using a new algorithm, or create software bridges that allow translation between systems. All of these approaches require time and money, and each can affect speed and accuracy.
At the scale proposed by DHS – potentially billions of records – even small compatibility gaps can escalate into major problems.
The documents also contain a placeholder indicating that DHS wants to incorporate voiceprint analysis, but it contains no detailed plans for how they would be collected, stored or searched. The agency previously used voiceprints in its “Alternative to Detention” program, which allowed immigrants to remain in their communities but required them to submit to intensive monitoring, including GPS ankle trackers and routine check-ins confirming their identities using biometric voiceprints.
