?Secure? Community
According to a report in the Boston Herald on Tuesday, September 27th, Deval Patrick, our Governor, is quoted as saying,”We already send all the fingerprints we gather to the federal government. ” If this is true, and I have no reason to dispute that, my question becomes if the State of Massachusetts already sends all fingerprints to the FBI, why aren’t the FBI and INS computeres linked and synced?
Wouldn’t a program like that make sense. Why are these two Federal agencies not linked? How many computer systems does the country have, or need to manage fingerprint data?
They already work together on some aspects of cooperation.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) today (06/22/2009)announced that, in partnership with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), it has met all milestones set forth in a joint business plan announced April 2, 2008, resulting in the elimination of the FBI National Name Check Program (NNCP) backlog.
They have been working on it for some aspects of background checks.
The Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or IAFIS, is a national fingerprint and criminal history system that responds to requests 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to help our local, state, and federal partners solve and prevent crime and catch criminals and terrorists. IAFIS provides automated fingerprint search capabilities, latent search capability, electronic image storage, and electronic exchange of fingerprints and responses.
The FBI established the Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division to serve as the focal point and central repository for criminal justice information services within the FBI. The CJIS Advisory Policy Board is a Shared Management Concept Process.The CJIS Division assumed management responsibility for the day-to-day operation of the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), and the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program.
IDENT is a program, begun 10 years ago, that had an original purpose of identifying immigration violators and hard-core criminals. You can check the status of IDENT/IAFIS Integration by reading Report No. I-2002-003 dated December 7, 2001.
It would appear that the Homeland Security Office is still working out the departmental integration process for a number of agencies under it’s cloak. The FBI and INS seem to be two of those with integration issues.
Looks like a good Organizational Chart would help this behemoth to move in the correct direction.
Just seems strange, and worthless, to have fingerprints, collected by the officer on the street, having to be sent twice, once to the national fingerprint and criminal history system and ,also, to an agency within the same umbrella group, the INS.
Read more about this in the following article.Illegal Immigration Fingerprint Program, Secure Communities, Has Advocates Up In Arms