The Electronic Frontier Foundation has officially filed its comments to the FBI on its request to exempt its biometric Next Generation Identification (NGI) program from certain provisions of America’s national Privacy Act.
The EFF has some objections. In a post on its NGI exemption comments, the civil liberties advocacy group says the NGI has been constructed and used with limited oversight, that the FBI has failed to comply with its legal obligation to disclose how the program is managed, and that many of the records its NGI database holds pertain to Americans who have never been convicted of a crime.
The organization also decries the FBI’s use of a huge trove of citizen ID records for facial recognition, as uncovered in a recent report from the Government Accountability Office. That report found the FBI to be in violation of the Privacy Act, from which it is now seeking exemption for NGI.
The EFF says more than 2,000 Americans have signed its petition against NGI’s Privacy Act exemption, and its comments objecting to the move were also signed by six other groups including the ACLU and Advocacy for Principled Action in Government.
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
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July 7, 2016 – by Alex Perala
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