Military Prison Builds Big Afghan Biometric Database
By Spencer Ackerman
August 25, 2010
BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — Don’t think of the new Detention Facility In Parwan as just a repository of locked-up insurgents. It’s also an emerging datafarm, storing biometric information on its inmate population. In a country with a shaky commitment to the rule of law, those identifiers could become weapons.阿富汗巴格拉姆空軍基地 - 不要以為在帕爾旺的新拘留設施衹是一個鎖定叛亂分子的信息庫，它亦是一個新興的數據農場，儲存它的犯人人口的生物特徵資料。在一個國家，有動搖的法治承諾，那些標識符號可以成為武器。
Parwan, with its thousand-or-so detainee population, will become an Afghan-run detention complex next year. By 2014, it’ll become a major Afghan jail, run by the Ministry of Justice to incarcerate convicted criminals, not hold insurgents taken off the battlefield. But Army Brigadier General Mark Martins, who currently runs day-to-day operations at the detention center, explains that there’s a basic problem with Afghanistan’s criminal justice system: It doesn’t have a efficient information infrastructure to identify the people it holds. That’s where he comes in.
有約1000被拘留者人口的帕爾旺，明年將變成為阿富汗經營的拘留複式。到2014年，它將變成一主要的阿富汗監獄，由司法部經營關押被定罪的罪犯，而不是扣押戰場取回的叛亂分子。但陸軍準將馬克馬丁斯，他目前管治拘留中心的日常運作，解釋有一基本問題在阿富汗的刑事司法制度：它沒有一個高效的信息基礎設施，以確定它握有的人，那就是他的用武之地 。
Every detainee who comes into Parwan leaves basic information with the Detainee Services Branch during in-processing: Name; father’s name; residence. A mark of any identifying scars, marks or tattoos. Residence of record. After a shower and a medical exam, the DSB scans their irises and collects prints from all of their fingers, rolling their thumbs for a 360-degree view. Its cameras snap five photographs of every detainee’s face. All of this information goes into a military database called the Automated Biometric Information System.
每名被羈留者來到帕爾旺葉留下基本資料，在處理過程中給拘留者服務科：名稱、父親名字、住處、任何識別的疤痕、傷印或紋身標記、居留紀錄。經過淋浴和體檢，DSB掃描他們的虹膜和收集他們所有手指的打印，滾動他們的大拇指作一360度的視角。它的相機快拍 5張每個被拘留者的臉部照片。所有這些資料將進入軍事數據庫，被稱為自動生物信息系統。
Troops in the field can access the system through a set of portable consoles that the DSB has on hand. The Biometrics Automated Toolset, or BATS, allows troops who detain insurgents on the battlefield to get a quick biometric identification of who they’ve captured, all through talking to the database. One clunky component of it, the Handheld Interagency Identity Detection System (HIIDE), which looks like a big black FunSaver, takes pictures of a captive’s irises, facial features and fingerprints. BATS and HIIDE were used in Iraq, where counterinsurgents like David Kilcullen praised the devices to Danger Room’s Nathan Hodge for allowing troops to quickly and positively identify known insurgents during the surge.
But any detective will tell you that a database is only as good as the data it contains. And after 30 years of war, Afghanistan isn’t really in the data-collection game. The U.S. military’s detentions command, known as Joint Task Force-435, is working with the Afghan Ministry of Interior to kick-start an up-to-date records program.
Martins says he and the ministry want “enrollments on 15 percent of fighting-age males,” Afghans between the ages of 14 and 49. Studies that he’s seen convince him that 15 percent represents a Gladwellian tipping point, allowing the U.S. and the Afghans to match exponentially more latent fingerprints off homemade bombs to Afghans in the system.
But that means biometric information about one million people. And the easiest way to get this information is by locking up a whole lot of Afghans and collecting it against their will, one of the reasons that human rights advocates are wary about the U.S.’s plans to turn over Parwan to the Afghans.
In Iraq, privacy advocates raised similar concerns about weaponizing the biometrics database — essentially, turning it into a military hit list. Afghanistan is filled with corruption, fraud and malicious police officers. Its commitment to the rule of law is, to be charitable, immature. In such a circumstance, a counterinsurgency tool like the biometric database just as easily become predatory, allowing its possessors to take out their political or ethnic rivals and reward their allies. If the WikiLeaks disclosures put Afghans in danger, imagine what iris scans and fingerprints could mean for people who don’t want to pay bribes to crooked cops.
“That’s a policy-significant issue,” Martins admits, “Who holds the data?” According to an October memorandum signed by the U.S. and Afghan governments, the Afghans will. The U.S. might see its collected records become the “biometric component of a national ID” Martins says, good for property ownership records, establishing credit lines and other economic behavior. But first, the biometrics database will be “MOI’s data,” in the hands of the security services — the legacy of ten years of U.S. detention operations in Afghanistan.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/military-prison-builds-big-afghan-biometric-database/
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