Posted on 01/03/2005 9:10:05 AM PST by demlosers
Deep inside a sprawling complex tucked in the hills of this Appalachian town, a room full of supercomputers attempts to sift America's guilty from its innocent.
This is where the FBI keeps its vast database of fingerprints, allowing examiners to conduct criminal checks from computer screens in less than 30 minutes--something that previously took them weeks as they rummaged through 2,100 file cabinets stuffed with inked print cards.
But the same digital technology that has allowed the FBI to speed such checks so dramatically over the last few years has created the risk of accusing people who are innocent, the Tribune has found.
Across the country, police departments and crime labs are submitting fingerprints for comparisons and for entry into databases, using digital images that may be missing crucial details or may have been manipulated without the FBI knowing it.
Not unlike a picture from a typical digital camera, a digital fingerprint provides less complete detail than a traditional photographic image. That matters little with pictures from the family vacation. But when the digital image is of a fingerprint, the lack of precision raises the specter of false identifications in criminal cases.
"There's a risk that not only would they exclude someone incorrectly--we have the potential to identify someone incorrectly," said David Grieve, a prominent fingerprint expert who is the latent prints training coordinator for the Illinois State Police crime lab system.
An FBI-sponsored group of fingerprint examiners was concerned enough about the quality of digital images that in 2001 it recommended doubling their resolution. Three years later, though, the vast majority of police agencies still use equipment with the lower resolution.
Equally troublesome, the most commonly used image-enhancement software, Adobe Photoshop, leaves no record of some of the changes police technicians can perform as they clean up fingerprint
(Excerpt) Read more at story.news.yahoo.com ...
They can use this technology to narrow the list of possible matches. And then confirm or disprove the match the old fashioned way.
Sadly the old fashioned way has its own problems. Prints can be lifted and moved, experts can differ on what constitutes a match. I would never accept a single print as absolute ID. I think there was only a single print found on the rifle used to kill Kennedy. Then we have only a single palm print on the Foster suicide note.
Not to mention the fact that we have no absolute proof that all prints are unique, just long accepted practice. I suppose we could today, with the powerful computers we have, do enough comparisons to firm up this idea, but so far we have not.
BUMP!
The problem with trying to firm up this idea of fingerprint uniqueness is that you'd have to take the fingerprints of a few billion more people to have a reasonable pool of data with which to work.
Consider the Washington attorney whose "fingerprint" was supposedly found on a bag in the Madrid train bombing, for example.
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