July 8,
2008: The U.S. has revealed that many
terrorists it arrests, or kills, in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere around the
world, already have arrest records in the United States and other nations. They
know this because early on in the war on terror, the Department of Defense
adopted many practices that major police departments have long taken 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.
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 to justify arresting them. 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.
Naturally,
the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies were data mining this database, and
running cross checks with other databases of people with known, or suspected,
criminal backgrounds. As was long suspected, many Islamic terrorists had spent
time in Western nations, where they participated in criminal scams, and were
often arrested. Same pattern in Moslem nations, where there was a strong
linkage between criminal behavior in general, and association with Islamic
terrorist organizations. Some of this is because the same kind of personality
is attracted to both lifestyles, but it's also long been a common practice for
Islamic terrorists to raise money, and gain access to weapons and explosives,
via criminal activities and connections with other criminals.
Pro-terrorist
message boards on the Internet have long been discussing the biometrics, and
the likelihood that the Western intelligence agencies were tracking terrorists
with this kind of information. This is probably why the FBI is going public
with this program. They discovered early on in Afghanistan, for example, that
about one percent of the al Qaeda suspects they picked up, already had an
arrest record back in the United States.