June 20, 2007: Early on in the war on terror, the
Department of Defense adopted many practices that major police departments take
for granted. One of the more useful techniques is biometrics. That is, every time
the troops encounter a "person of interest", they don't just take their name
and address, they also use portable electronic tools to take fingerprints, a
retinal scan and photos. All this is stored in a database, which now contains
hundreds of thousands of records for Iraqis, Afghans, and other "persons
of interest". The fingerprints are particularly useful, because when they
are stored electronically, you can search and find out immediately if the print
you have just lifted from somewhere else, like the fragment of a car bomb, is
in there or not. The digital photos, from several angles, are also useful,
because these pictures are run through software that creates a numeric "ID"
that can be used by security cameras to look for some one specific, or for finding
someone from a witness description. Other nations are digitizing their mug
shots, and this enables these people to be quickly checked against those in the
American database.Â
For decades, the U.S. military has regularly
collected huge amounts of information from accidents, or even combat
encounters. So now, it's no surprise that forensics teams examine each bombing
(car or roadside), to see if they can get fingerprints. Often bomb makers are
found this way, because raids frequently encounter suspicious characters, but
no evidence that can lock them up. It only takes about two minutes per subject
to take the biometric data, so any suspicious characters are added to the
database. Now, after several years of this, raiding parties know to grab any
guy who seems to panic at the sight of the biometrics equipment coming out. The
terrorists know that biometrics is bad news for them, and they fear it.
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Many combat troops now get training on how to use
the biometrics gear, and everyone now accepts that this stuff is a powerful
weapon in the war against terrorists.
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