Worries about Afghan biometric database

The U.S. military’s new Detention Facility In Parwan is not just a holding pen for suspected insurgents. It is also an emerging datafarm, storing biometric information on its inmate population. Spencer Ackerman writes in Innovya that in a country with a shaky commitment to the rule of law, those identifiers could become weapons.

Parwan, with its thousand-or-so detainee population, will become an Afghan-run detention complex next year. By 2014 it willl become a major Afghan jail, run by the Ministry of Justice to incarcerate convicted criminals, not hold insurgents taken off the battlefield. Ackerman quotes U.S. Army Brigadier General Mark Martins, who currently runs day-to-day operations at the detention center, to explain that there is a basic problem with Afghanistan’s criminal justice system: It does not have an efficient information infrastructure to identify the people it holds.

This is where General Martin comes in. Every detainee who comes into Parwan leaves basic information with the Detainee Services Branch (DSB) during in-processing: Name; father’s name; residence. A mark of any identifying scars, marks or tattoos. Residence of record. After a shower and a medical exam, the DSB scans their irises and collects prints from all of their fingers, rolling their thumbs for a 360-degree view. Its cameras snap five photographs of every detainee’s face. All of this information goes into a military database called the Automated Biometric Information System.

Ackerman notes that troops in the field can access the system through a set of portable consoles that the DSB has on hand. The Biometrics Automated Toolset, or BAT, allows troops who detain insurgents on the battlefield to get a quick biometric identification of who they have captured, all through talking to the database (“Distinguishing friend from foe: Afghani biometrics database expanded,” 17 August 2010 HSNW). One component of it, the Handheld Interagency Identity Detection System (HIIDE), takes pictures of a captive’s irises, facial features, and fingerprints. BATS and HIIDE were used in Iraq, where counterinsurgents like David Kilcullen praised the devices for allowing troops quickly and positively to identify known insurgents during the surge (“The promise, and risks, of battlefield biometrics,” 11 August 2010 HSNW).

Martins says he and the Afghan authorities want “enrollments on 15 percent of fighting-age males,” Afghans between the ages of 14 and 49. Studies that he has seen convince him that 15 percent represents a tipping point, allowing the U.S. and the Afghans to match exponentially more latent fingerprints off homemade bombs to Afghans in the system.

Ackerman writes that human rights advocates are wary about the biometric project in general, and about U.S. plans to turn over Parwan to the Afghans in particular. In Iraq, privacy advocates raised similar concerns about weaponizing the biometrics database — essentially, turning it into a military hit list. Ackerman writes:

Afghanistan is filled with corruption, fraud, and malicious police officers. Its commitment to the rule of law is, to be charitable, immature. In such a circumstance, a counterinsurgency tool like the biometric database just as easily become predatory, allowing its possessors to take out their political or ethnic rivals and reward their allies. If the WikiLeaks disclosures put Afghans in danger, imagine what iris scans and fingerprints could mean for people who don’t want to pay bribes to crooked cops.

“That’s a policy-significant issue,” Martins admits, “Who holds the data?” According to an October memorandum signed by the U.S. and Afghan governments, the Afghans will. The United States might see its collected records become the “biometric component of a national ID” Martins says, good for property ownership records, establishing credit lines and other economic behavior. “But first, the biometrics database will be ‘MOI’s data,’ in the hands of the security services — the legacy of ten years of U.S. detention operations in Afghanistan,” Ackerman concludes.