The FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) system is claiming a special victory in the fight against crime. It was used to track down a convicted pedophile a full 19 years after he escaped his sentence.
In 1996, Lynn Cozart fled his home state of Pennsylvania after being convicted of sexually assaulting his own children; he made his escape shortly before he was due to be sentenced. This year, the NGI matched his face to that on a driver’s licence held by one ‘David Stone’, in Oklahoma. Under the assumed name, Cozart had started a new life and was working in a Walmart store. Alerted by the FBI, local authorities made their arrest, and Cozart will now have to answer for his crimes.
The NGI is a multimodal biometric identification system intended for use by law enforcement agencies from the local to the national level. It first went live in 2013, and over the following year its digital records gradually replaced all physical archival materials as the system itself fully replaced the previous Automated Fingerprint Identification System. The NGI became fully operational last September. The technologically advanced system is clearly starting to pay off, and should yield many more such results going forward.
Source: International Business Times
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July 10, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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