DHS wants a single search engine to flag faces and fingerprints across agencies

The Department of Homeland Security is moving to consolidate its facial recognition and others biometric technologies into a single system capable of comparing faces, fingerprints, iris scans and other identifiers collected across its enforcement agencies, according to records reviewed by WIRED.

The agency is asking private biometrics contractors how to build a unified platform that allows employees to search faces and fingerprints across large government databases already filled with biometrics collected in different contexts. The goal is to connect components including Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Secret Service and DHS headquarters, replacing a patchwork of tools that don’t easily share data.

The system will support watchlist, detention or removal operations and comes as DHS is pushes biometric surveillance far beyond ports of entry and in the hands of intelligence units and masked agents hundreds of thousands operated from the border.

The records show DHS is trying to buy a single “matching engine” that could take different types of biometrics — faces, fingerprints, iris scans and more — and run them through the same backend, giving multiple DHS agencies one shared system. In theory, this means that the platform will handle both identity checks and investigative searches.

For face recognition specifically, identity verification means that the system compares one photo to a single stored record and returns a yes-or-no answer based on match. For investigations, it searches a large database and ranks the closest-looking faces for a human to review instead of making a call independently.

Both types of searches come with real technical limits. In identity checks, the systems are more sensitive, and thus less likely to falsely flag an innocent person. However, they will not identify a match when the photo submitted is slightly blurry, slanted or outdated. For investigative searches, the cutoff is significantly lower, and while the system is more likely to include the right person somewhere in the results, it also produces far more false positives that require human review.

The documents make it clear that DHS wants control over how strict or permissive a match should be — depending on the context.

The department also wants the system wired directly into its existing infrastructure. Contractors will be required to link the match to existing biometric sensors, enrollment systems, and data repositories so that information collected in one DHS component can be searched against records maintained by another.

It is unclear how workable this is. Different DHS agencies have purchased their biometric systems from different companies over many years. Each system turns a face or fingerprint into a string of numbers, but many are designed to work only with the specific software that created them.

In practice, this means that a new department-wide search tool cannot simply flip a switch and make everything compatible. DHS will likely need to convert old records into a common format, rebuild them using a new algorithm, or create software bridges that translate between systems. All of these approaches take time and money, and each can affect speed and accuracy.

At the scale DHS suggests — potentially billions of records — even small compatibility gaps can lead to big problems.

The documents also contain a placeholder indicating that DHS wants to incorporate voiceprint analysis, but it contains no detailed plans for how it will be collected, stored or searched. The agency previously used voiceprints in its “Alternative to Detention” program, which allowed immigrants to remain in their communities but required them to submit to intensive monitoring, including GPS ankle trackers and routine enrollments that confirm their identity using biometric voiceprints.