A for-profit vendor built a proprietary national biometric database by extracting iris scans from public county jail booking rooms, one intake at a time, then turned around and sold federal access to the biometrics of prisoners.

Plymouth County Correctional Facility is operated by the Sheriff’s Department, and Bi2 Technologies (Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies) developed technology with sheriffs for use in jails and prisons. One co-founder, Peter Flynn, is a retired sheriff. Sheriffs were paid with taxpayer money to run the jails, book inmates, but also scan irises into his private database. More than five million records have been drawn from 247 agencies, with every figure now paywalled for profit.

ICE has paid for access twice. First in September for $4.6 million and 200 devices. Now for $25.1 million and 1,570, awarded May 22 without competition because the agency has declared Bi2 the only firm capable of the work.

The justification for all this rushed work is a false “border emergency”. The new ICE contract even sends the system into the field before FedRAMP. The records will reach ERO agents by late June. Since FedRAMP exists to assess whether a vendor can secure the data properly, Bi2 will be running without answers to baseline questions before the data is exposed. Live biometrics of more than a million people will move through field devices without safety baselines established, during a war with Iran.

So the news is that public jails with public money built a biometrics database that a private company fenced, which is being sold to the public for more public money to run unsafely based on an emergency that doesn’t seem to exist.