TAMPA, Fla.—The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) supports moving forward with a new identity database that goes beyond the current system that is heavily based on fingerprints as new and existing customers increase their demand on the repository, a department official said here on Wednesday.
DHS is expected to make a decision on moving forward with a new database within the next two to four years, Kenneth Gantt, acting deputy director of the Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM), said at the Global Identity Summit here. This will depend on funding but DHS is supportive of a new capability, he later told
Defense Daily in an interview. 
The IDENT database went from having information on 150 million unique individuals and 2220,000 daily transactions a year ago to 173 million unique records and 300,000 customer queries currently, Gantt said.
In the next two to three years OBIM expects daily transactions to rise to about 400,000, he said.
“The mission is growing for us and it is growing big time,” Gantt said.
Transaction volume is the key driver behind the drive to go to a new identity database and Gantt said the current system will become saturated at around 375,000 daily queries, which is when capabilities will begin to be degraded, Gantt said. Above 400,000 transactions each day, there will be further degradation, although the system will continue functioning, he said in the interview.
At that point, leadership decisions have to be made about the system, Gantt said.
Degradation is measured relative to the response time of queries against a national watchlist within IDENT that consists of about 8.8 million records of higher threat individuals such as known and suspected terrorists. Customs and Border Protection’s current requirement for the response time is 10 seconds “and that’s a driver for us right now,” Gantt said.
The IDENT system is part of what is commonly called US-VISIT. OBIM, which is part of the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD) within DHS, is responsible for storing, matching and sharing of records and queries related to IDENT. Other functions of US-VISIT were transferred elsewhere within DHS last year, with CBP responsible for entry and exit of foreign national into the United States and Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorized to track down individuals that have overstayed their visas in the country.
Just like the FBI and Defense Department have done with their new biometric databases, the Next Generation Identification (NGI) system and an upgraded version of the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), respectively, Gantt said the new system that DHS eventually procures through a full and open competition will be multimodal. The modalities will be fingerprint, iris and face, he said, with plans to store voice and possibly even go for DNA, which is “the ultimate biometric.” This will depend on where DHS “wants to go,” he added.
Accenture [ACN] was the systems developer and integrator for US-VISIT but is no longer supporting IDENT. That role belongs to CSC now [CSC]. Cogent, which is part of 3M Corp. [MMM], supplies the fingerprint matching capability for IDENT.
Lockheed Martin [LMT] is the prime contractor for the NGI system and Northrop Grumman [NOC] for the DoD ABIS system.
Some of the growing demand for IDENT services is because there are new customers of the system, Gantt said. In the past year the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Transportation Security Administration have begun using the repository, he told attendees at the conference, which was presented by AFCEA and the Biometrics Consortium.
Pending customers include the Secret Service, the Federal Protective Service, which is also part of NPPD, and the Office of the Chief Security Officer within the Directorate for Management, according to Gantt’s briefing slides.
IDENT has a 99.7 percent accuracy rate for fingerprint searches. The system also contains biographic data, photographs, travel document data and contextual data.