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posted by janrinok on Wednesday January 18 2017, @05:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the beware-the-'secret'-databases dept.

A suspected child molester has been caught by the FBI using automated facial recognition technology:

A fugitive suspected of molesting a 10-year-old Indiana girl 17 years ago has been arrested after the Federal Bureau of Investigation employed facial recognition technology, according to court documents. The bureau said the suspect's US passport photo in December was run though a Facial Analysis, Comparison, and Evaluation (FACE) test, and it matched photos taken before he disappeared nearly two decades ago.

Charles Hollin, 61, was arrested in Salem, Oregon last week at a Walmart where he works. He had both Minnesota and Oregon driver's licenses with his picture on them. The agency said it did not perform a biometrics analysis with those databases because they have not opened up their DMV roles for the bureau to search. The bureau noted in a court filing that the government maintains "top secret" databases containing biometric profiles.

"The Department of Motor Vehicles for Minnesota and Oregon were not searched due to the fact that it was prohibited by law. Additional searches were conducted in various federal secret and top secret databases. All of these searches were negative," Todd Prewitt, an FBI agent, wrote in court documents (PDF).


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @06:52AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @06:52AM (#455262)

    They spend gazillion dollars on facial recognition and finally get one match.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @11:49AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @11:49AM (#455332)

    1) He has a job.
    2) He needs to live close to his job, a.k.a. he has a living place, requiring he needs to pay bills/taxes.
    3) He has multiple driver's licenses, which he had to request from the government.

    Any of the above would have exposed his name, where a check up with his person in criminal records would flag up. Setting up such semi-automated check system would be relative easy and would not require mass surveillance methods.