The county’s law enforcement officials are looking for “Automated Fingerprint Identification and Facial Recognition System”, according to the article, and more specifically are interested in plan-impression live scanning, a newer iteration of the technology. Bexar County has a population of almost 2 million and includes the City of San Antonio, the seventh most populous city in the US, so law enforcement authorities’ attainment of this kind of technology could have a dramatic impact.
Bexar County’s case is symptomatic of a larger trend as biometric technology is of growing interest to government and security agencies around the world. Police in the UK are keen to get their hands on such technology to better protect the country against perceived terrorist threats in addition to improving regular policing, while India is undergoing a nationwide project to get biometric identification of the entire population, partly in the service of maintaining security.
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October 30, 2014 – by Alex Perala