FBI analyzes 200,000 fingerprints per day

Every time you enter the United States, fingerprints are taken at your airport using a wireless scanner. The prints are instantly transferred to a special FBI laboratory, where they are sent to the database at the same second.



A journalist from the transfer of CrimeTracker 10 was able to visit this secret lab. The article provides quite interesting statistics of the amount of work that the FBI supercomputers have to perform. All illustrations in this text are frames made in the laboratory.
')


A huge fingerprint repository occupies an 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 in liberty?).







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



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



There are usually ten fingers in each set, so that the number of fingerprints being analyzed is about two million. If you count the number of comparisons, it is 600 billion per day.



Thanks to computerized fingerprint analysis, the police make 15,000 arrests a month.



It’s hard to imagine how big this database will grow if you also add retinal scans, biometric data of a person and other biometric information. Work on filling this database is already in full swing. By the way, material and additional databases on the recognition of tattoos and wrist prints are being filled in parallel.



via Wired