A Kurdish security soldier is seen silhouetted as he walks by along queue of cars carrying Iraqi citizen fleeing from Mosul and other northern Iraqi towns, in the Khazer area between the Iraqi city of Mosul and the Kurdish city of Irbil, northern Iraq.

A Kurdish security soldier is seen silhouetted as he walks by along queue of cars carrying Iraqi citizen fleeing from Mosul and other northern Iraqi towns, in the Khazer area between the Iraqi city of Mosul and the Kurdish city of Irbil, northern Iraq. AP / HUSSEIN MALLA

‘Jihadi John’ and the Future of the Biometrics Terror Hunt

The future of the biometrics dragnets that identified an Islamic State executioner is on a hilltop in West Virginia.

On Thursday, the Washington Post and BBC publicly identified Mohammed Emwazi, a British-educated, Kuwaiti-born man in his mid 20s, as “Jihadi John,” the Islamic State frontman who executed several hostages on camera, to the world’s horror.

“We will not comment on ongoing investigations and therefore are not in a position to confirm or deny the identity of this individual,” the FBI said Thursday.

Denials aside, FBI director James Comey said months ago that they knew John’s identity.

If the FBI has in fact identified Jihadi John, the victory was, in part, a product of the FBIs growing collaboration with the Department of Defense -- a relationship that will grow much more cozy in the coming years, in the black cherry tree dotted hills of Clarksburg, West Virginia.

About four hours away from Washington D.C. sits the headquarters of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, or CJIS, which houses the bureau’s Biometric Center of Excellence. The center is not a place so much as a program begun in 2007 that plays a key role in making use of all the biometric data that comes into the FBI's possession. That’s every fingerprint, every image, and every phone message that anyone sends to the FBI.

“Bottom line for us … if any of our divisions, whether it be our counterterrorism division, our criminal division, if at any time during their investigations they develop biometrics … they submit it through our system,” Stephen L. Morris, assistant director of the CJIS, told Defense One at a recent conference in Washington. In terms of identifying John, he said, “I’m not going to tell you how we did it,” but added, “You have to have something to search … you can have images with faces but if you’re not capturing it in the right way, if there’s not data in that image to make a comparison, it’s just not useful.”

This, in part, is why the biometric center plays a role in bringing parties, and their biometric databases, together. The FBI’s system is called the Next Generation Identification, or NGI. It includes photos, aliases, physical characteristics and, of course, fingerprints. Today, it’s completely interoperable with the military’s Automated Biometric Identification System, or ABIS, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Automated Biometric Identification System, or IDENT . The center also works with the State Department and allied law enforcement agencies around the world. The FBI and Britain’s MI5 have been working together to identify John.

Obtaining a biometric record on a suspect to match against a terrorist video of a masked jihadi is not something done easily or robotically. It requires old school investigation, either sifting through lots of hours of collected video footage and comparing that to crime videos (such as beheadings), or going out into the field to find voice samples on suspects to match against crime videos, or both.

This is where the Defense Department’s extensive library of biometric signatures, gathered on the field in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, can play a role in future investigations. The department’s biometrically enabled watch list, or BEWL, houses more than 200,000 records.

“I can’t speak enough about our relationship with the Department of Defense. After 9/11, our mission in life changed. It was all about national security, our partnership with DHS and DOD -- to say it expanded is an understatement,” Morris said at a recent biometrics conference in Washington, D.C. “Their ABIS system was connected with our system, so they have a small group of folks who are out there [in West Virginia] in charge of their system. Having them co-locate with us has been very important.”

That important relationship is about to get a lot more intimate. Later this year, the FBI is going to open a $328 million, 360,000-square foot Biometric Technology Center next to the current CJIS campus. The Defense Department will get about 40,000 square feet in the building, which will also consolidate the FBI's biometric workers and operations. “Anything and everything we do will be run out of that building,” said Morris.

In September of last year, the FBI announced that the $1.2 billion dollar NGI system was fully operational (it was rolled out in increments over a period of years). If it works according to plan, it will provide law enforcement with a very fast and reliable sense of exactly who they are talking to, what threat that individual may pose, and what records they’ve left -- fingerprints, voiceprints, etc. -- in what places.

But fingerprints don’t help you catch everyone. Voice recognition played a key role in the identification of Jihadi John, according to published reports. The FBI’s biometric center site lists voice recognition as one of its key modalities, or areas of study, along with DNA and others, but fingerprints and more traditional biometric signatures make up a bulk of the records it manages.

Voice, in many ways, represents a crucial gap in biometrics collection for both the Defense Department and law enforcement. In a noisy environment it can be very hard to get a dataset to do matching against, a huge technical issue that the government is actively looking to solve .

In Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers have compiled huge datasets of people that they have come across, including finger scans, pictures, and iris scans. Any of those can serve as a reliable red flag for a Turkish border guard, or, for that matter, a New York cop with a suspect in the chair. But they don’t do much against a villain broadcasting terror from a safely fortified mountaintop in Syria.

Some of the men fighting with ISIS today have probably left their fingerprints in a few places where Western law enforcement could pick them up and share them. Technology, by itself, won’t find those places. But, once the data is found, it can make positive identification much faster and easier, as it apparently has with ISIS’s most infamous fiend.

X
This website uses cookies to enhance user experience and to analyze performance and traffic on our website. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. Learn More / Do Not Sell My Personal Information
Accept Cookies
X
Cookie Preferences Cookie List

Do Not Sell My Personal Information

When you visit our website, we store cookies on your browser to collect information. The information collected might relate to you, your preferences or your device, and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to and to provide a more personalized web experience. However, you can choose not to allow certain types of cookies, which may impact your experience of the site and the services we are able to offer. Click on the different category headings to find out more and change our default settings according to your preference. You cannot opt-out of our First Party Strictly Necessary Cookies as they are deployed in order to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting the cookie banner and remembering your settings, to log into your account, to redirect you when you log out, etc.). For more information about the First and Third Party Cookies used please follow this link.

Allow All Cookies

Manage Consent Preferences

Strictly Necessary Cookies - Always Active

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Sale of Personal Data, Targeting & Social Media Cookies

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, you have the right to opt-out of the sale of your personal information to third parties. These cookies collect information for analytics and to personalize your experience with targeted ads. You may exercise your right to opt out of the sale of personal information by using this toggle switch. If you opt out we will not be able to offer you personalised ads and will not hand over your personal information to any third parties. Additionally, you may contact our legal department for further clarification about your rights as a California consumer by using this Exercise My Rights link

If you have enabled privacy controls on your browser (such as a plugin), we have to take that as a valid request to opt-out. Therefore we would not be able to track your activity through the web. This may affect our ability to personalize ads according to your preferences.

Targeting cookies may be set through our site by our advertising partners. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. They do not store directly personal information, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet device. If you do not allow these cookies, you will experience less targeted advertising.

Social media cookies are set by a range of social media services that we have added to the site to enable you to share our content with your friends and networks. They are capable of tracking your browser across other sites and building up a profile of your interests. This may impact the content and messages you see on other websites you visit. If you do not allow these cookies you may not be able to use or see these sharing tools.

If you want to opt out of all of our lead reports and lists, please submit a privacy request at our Do Not Sell page.

Save Settings
Cookie Preferences Cookie List

Cookie List

A cookie is a small piece of data (text file) that a website – when visited by a user – asks your browser to store on your device in order to remember information about you, such as your language preference or login information. Those cookies are set by us and called first-party cookies. We also use third-party cookies – which are cookies from a domain different than the domain of the website you are visiting – for our advertising and marketing efforts. More specifically, we use cookies and other tracking technologies for the following purposes:

Strictly Necessary Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Functional Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Performance Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Sale of Personal Data

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.

Social Media Cookies

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.

Targeting Cookies

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.