Word: fingerprinted
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...Although FBI agents joke, mostly accurately, that the bureau's motto is "yesterday's technology tomorrow," the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, best known for identifying teenager Lee Malvo as a suspect in the Washington sniper case, has recently scored stunning breakthroughs in some old, "cold" homicide cases...
...database's latest collar, Martinez fled to New York City, changed his name and, years later, applied for U.S. citizenship. He was about to get it when, on January 30, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service submitted his fingerprints to the FBI database which stores and scans 44.5 million digital fingerprint images dating back 70 years. Within hours, the computer popped up his true name, the 1973 arrest and a wanted notice from the South Fallsburg, NY, police - feats impossible using the ink-and-card files employed until IAFIS was launched in 1999 "He thought after so long we weren...
Sometimes the best prints don't exist in the real world at all. In some forensics labs investigators can take digital snapshots of a fingerprint on, say, a colorful soda can, then manipulate the image to float the print off the can. "We cancel out the background," says Narveson, "which gives us a lot better chance to capture the detail of the print...
Other technologies are less experimental. One of the fondest dreams of law-enforcement officials is to build a national computer system that holds the fingerprints and DNA of every known felon and the ballistic signature of every gun ever used in a crime. Early versions of each of these databases--the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network (NIBIN) and the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS)--already exist, but they are not yet all fully operational...
...inmates refused to give up their DNA. The state supreme court slapped down the suit by refusing to review the matter, and last month Governor Gray Davis signed legislation allowing jail officials to take samples by force if necessary. "I logically cannot see the difference between a person's fingerprint and a DNA fingerprint," says Lisa Kahn, a Los Angeles prosecutor. Argues Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project: "Fingerprints don't tell you anything other than a fingerprint." With DNA, "there is potentially a lot more information about people that we may not want to share with...