U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

In 1892, Sir Francis Galton published a treatise in which he argued that the patterns on our fingers were “an incomparably surer criterion of identity than any other bodily feature.” Today, fingerprinting is ubiquitous. But the limits of the technique are clear: Fingerprinting is a targeted, one-off process whereby a single person is identified, typically through an in-person or on-site interaction. Advanced face recognition, on the other hand, lets police identify people from far away and without interacting with them...

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