The Electronic Frontier Foundation, as part of its ongoing Freedom of Information requests for exposure of government privacy intrusions, reported today that the FBI will have a fully operational facial recognition database by this summer, with 52 million faces in it by next year.  Even worse: It will include law-abiding citizens, not just criminals.

EFF explains why you should care:

Currently, if you apply for any type of job that requires fingerprinting or a background check, your prints are sent to and stored by the FBI in its civil print database. However, the FBI has never before collected a photograph along with those prints. This is changing with NGI. Now an employer could require you to provide a “mug shot” photo along with your fingerprints. If that’s the case, then the FBI will store both your face print and your fingerprints along with your biographic data.

In the past, the FBI has never linked the criminal and non-criminal fingerprint databases. This has meant that any search of the criminal print database (such as to identify a suspect or a latent print at a crime scene) would not touch the non-criminal database.  This will also change with NGI. Now every record—whether criminal or non—will have a “Universal Control Number” (UCN), and every search will be run against all records in the database. This means that even if you have never been arrested for a crime, if your employer requires you to submit a photo as part of your background check, your face image could be searched—and you could be implicated as a criminal suspect—just by virtue of having that image in the non-criminal file.

This fits in nicely with the continued portrayals of liberty-minded constitutionalists and declaratists as domestic terrorists by the federal government.  All one needs to do is look at the standoff last week between armed citizens and federal agents to see how close we are to having ourselves declared criminals.  What guarantees do we have that the government will not use our fingerprints and photos to implicate us in crimes?  The answer is none.

While the fingerprinting is something we have grown accustomed to (and many Americans have been fingerprinted for everything from a concealed carry permit to employment), as EFF points out, the government has never linked it to photos before.  Between the license plate databases, the tracking of cell phones, the reading and storing of email and internet activity, and now having photos to go with the fingerprints, how hard would it really be to set someone up?