Criminal Investigations (OBIM)
Department of Homeland Security · USSS
Overview
- Development stage
- DeployedSource: c) Deployed – The use case is being actively authorized or utilized to support the functions or mission of an agency.
- High-impact designation
- High-impactSource: a) High-impact
- Impact justification
- Not reported
- Start date
- 2017-01-01 (day precision)Source: 2017-01-01T00:00:00
- Withheld from public reporting
- Not reported
Mission
- Topic area
- Law Enforcement
- Operational functions
- Biometrics and identity Derived by keyword rules; see methodology
Problem the AI is intended to solve
The intended problem to solve is the identification of unknown victims and suspects involved in crimes that undermine the integrity of U.S. financial and payment systems. By using facial recognition and biometric image comparison, the USSS aims to efficiently and accurately identify individuals connected to criminal investigations, thereby supporting law enforcement efforts to detect, arrest, and prevent such crimes.
Expected benefits
The intended purpose of this AI is so that USSS personnel may submit available photographs or video stills of these unknown persons as probe images (facial images or templates searched against the gallery of an FRS) to other government agencies for comparison against their image galleries. The agencies will query their image galleries of known persons and may provide lists of potential matches. They may use the potential matches to produce investigative leads which will assist in the further identification of victims or suspects. Additionally, we may request another government agency to conduct a one-to-one comparison of two photographs or video stills for investigative use.
System outputs
The system will query image galleries of known persons and may provide lists of potential matches. USSS personnel may use the potential matches to produce investigative leads which will assist in the further identification of victims or suspects.
Technology
- AI classification
- Computer visionSource: Computer Vision: AI that processes and interprets visual data (e.g., images and videos).
- System name(s)
- Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT)
- Custom-developed code
- Yes
- Public source code
- Not reported
Sourcing
- How it was built
- Purchased from vendorSource: a) Purchased from a vendor
- Vendor (as reported)
- NEC
- Vendors (standardized)
- NEC
A vendor is the supplier named by the agency. It does not identify the underlying model or AI technology.
Data and privacy
- Involves PII
- Yes
- Privacy Impact Assessment
- www.dhs.gov ↗
- Authorization to Operate
- Yes
- Demographic features
- Not reported
- Training and evaluation data
- Trained on mugshot data and paid volunteers.
- Federal Data Catalog
- Not reported
Governance
8 of 8 minimum-practice questions answered. A blank answer means the agency reported nothing; it does not mean the practice is absent.
Potential impacts and how they were identified
The product was developed by the NEC using AI and Deep Machine Learning to train the algorithm, however, the current NEC product that is used by OBIM in the production environment does not use AI to continue to train the NEC algorithm on production data. The fact that OBIM/NEC do not use AI on production data to continue to train the algorithm significantly limits the risks associated with the use of AI and ML on the face candidate list process.