Faced with structural limits in its existing biometric database system, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is asking Congress for $66 million to begin the first increment of the Replacement Biometric System that will serve as the foundation for the remaining work on the new system.
The Replacement Biometric System, which will be built over four 18-month increments beginning in FY ’16, will designed to serve the mid- and long-term needs of DHS, according to budget documents submitted to Congress this month.
The first increment will include an online transaction processing database, new workflow and business rules management software to replace the transaction manager, and new middleware for biometric matching services, the documents say.
The Replacement Biometric System, if funded by Congress, will eventually replace the current Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT), which is maintained by the Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM). The office provides identity services through matching, storing, comparing, and analyzing biometric data, and serves the department’s components as well as other federal departments and local agencies.
In FY ’14, IDENT contained 146 million records and processed 88 million transactions. By the end of FY ’16, DHS expects IDENT to contain the fingerprints of 222 million unique identities and handle 120 million transactions.
“New stakeholder demands and requirements continue to stretch the system’s ability to provide matching services while still meeting existing customer Service Level Agreements,” the budget documents say. DHS says that investments in IDENT will sustain the system through FY ’19 but that “layering additional hardware will not solve IDENT’s architectural limitations,” driving the need for the new system.
CSC [CSC] currently supports IDENT while Cogent, which is part of 3M Corp. [MMM], supplies the fingerprint matching capability for the system.
If DHS doesn’t begin moving to the new biometric system in FY ’16, the IDENT system will begin experiencing degradation in 2016. These problems include longer wait times at the border, admitting people into the U.S. that shouldn’t be allowed to enter, lower operational availability, and lack of identification support for DHS personnel to properly identify known or suspected terrorists and other dangerous individuals.
“As a result, the Department would need to make difficult choices in regards to IDENT operations, including the cessation of service to some DHS customers, potentially dropping populations from IDENT storage, and/or accepting system degradation,” DHS warns.
The $65.8 million budget request for the Replacement Biometric System says it will be more efficient and cost effective than IDENT, through “O&M cost avoidance, improved detection capabilities, multi-modal capabilities, more efficient processing, and improved ability to scale the system to meet DHS and other partners’ requirements.”
The new system will contain 450 million records and permit 720,000 daily fingerprint transactions, which is 262 million annual transactions. Subsequent increments will enable the system to have multi-modal biometric capabilities such as iris-scanning and faction recognition, and provide greater operational flexibility and accuracy.
After the system reaches full operational capability, which is 450 million records, it will still be scalable in terms of capacity and performance.