Military looks to upgrade its “tactical biometrics” with Identity Dominance System 2

US Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Britain Morris, an infantryman with Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, "enrolls" an Afghan into the SEEK II system, part of the Navy and Marine Corps' Identity Dominance System, during a patrol in Washer, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, July 29, 2013. The Marines are seeking an upgrade to their biometric toolkit. (credit: US Marine Corps)

The Navy and Marine Corps are looking to upgrade biometric tools used by forces in the field and at sea that would give them the power to identify individuals both up close and at a distance. In an announcement kicking off the Identity Dominance System (IDS) 2 program, the Marine Corps Systems Command put out a call for information on potential sources for portable systems to collect everything from voice and gait data to DNA samples—tools that would turn troops in the field into high-powered forensics investigators and create profiles to track every human they encounter.

Starting in 2007, the US military fielded a set of biometric tools in Afghanistan intended to achieve what the Defense Department calls "identity dominance"—the ability to identify and track every single human being in the country and, in the process, make it impossible for the Taliban and other insurgents to live undetected among civilian populations. The equipment fielded by the services soon became "programs of record"—established procurement programs with their own management offices; the Army called its system the Biometrics Automated Toolset-Army (BAT-A), and the Navy and Marine Corps called theirs the AN/PYX-1 IDS. These systems, assembled mostly from off-the-shelf technology, allow American forces to record the facial, iris, and fingerprint biometric data of anyone they encounter.

Identity dominance has scored some wins for the military: as Public Intelligence reported, in 2012, an Afghani man was arrested during a sweep of a village in Khost Province because his fingerprint data matched fingerprints found on a cache of explosives found in 2011. And it's believed that the Navy's IDS was used by Navy SEALs to positively identify Osama Bin Laden during the raid on his compound in Pakistan. The systems and data have also been adopted by the Afghan government, which has used it to essentially fingerprint the entire country to control travel and access to certain areas, as well as to create a national identity card system.

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