Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday February 08 2017, @05:21PM   Printer-friendly

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The FBI's Rap Back program is quietly transforming the way employers conduct background checks. While routine background checks provide employers with a one-time "snapshot" of their employee's past criminal history, employers enrolled in federal and state Rap Back programs receive ongoing, real-time notifications and updates about their employees' run-ins with law enforcement, including arrests at protests and charges that do not end up in convictions. ("Rap" is an acronym for Record of Arrest and Prosecution; "Back" is short for background.) Testifying before Congress about the program in 2015, FBI Director James Comey explained some limits of regular background checks: "People are clean when they first go in, then they get in trouble five years down the road [and] never tell the daycare about this."

A majority of states already have their own databases that they use for background checks and have accessed in-state Rap Back programs since at least 2007; states and agencies now partnering with the federal government will be entering their data into the FBI's Next Generation Identification (NGI) database. The NGI database, widely considered to be the world's largest biometric database, allows federal and state agencies to search more than 70 million civil fingerprints submitted for background checks alongside over 50 million prints submitted for criminal purposes. In July 2015, Utah became the first state to join the federal Rap Back program. Last April, aviation workers at Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport and Boston Logan International Airport began participating in a federal Rap Back pilot program for aviation employees. Two weeks ago, Texas submitted its first request to the federal criminal Rap Back system.

Rap Back has been advertised by the FBI as an effort to target individuals in "positions of trust," such as those who work with children, the elderly, and the disabled. According to a Rap Back spokesperson, however, there are no formal limits as to "which populations of individuals can be enrolled in the Rap Back Service." Civil liberties advocates fear that under Trump's administration the program will grow with serious consequences for employee privacy, accuracy of records, and fair employment practices.

Rap Back Privacy Impact Assessment

-- submitted from IRC


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 08 2017, @07:55PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday February 08 2017, @07:55PM (#464719)

    Whats "our core values" in a multicultural society? What about when "our core values" is nothing but we like money?

    Isn't game playing a valuable ability? In that case if we got 300M people and rising and 90M jobs and falling, then maybe good game players make the best workers?

    further divide our society into classes

    I think we're pretty near maxing that out. Nothing is more uniquely American than setting up a rigid class structure then claiming there isn't one and we don't talk about class structure in polite company. In practice we make the (dot) Indians look flexible and open to change.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Wednesday February 08 2017, @10:09PM

    by Zz9zZ (1348) on Wednesday February 08 2017, @10:09PM (#464794)

    We supposedly value freedom and equality. Obviously that is not even close to how it plays out in reality, but that is what many people believe the US stands for. We aren't bound together by common culture, we're bound together by the documents that structure our society. We have never been true to those values, but we're getting better.

    --
    ~Tilting at windmills~