Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System

What Watson did not know was that the world was building the tool that would undo him.

In the nineteen nineties, the FBI began developing the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, known as IAFIS.

It was one of the most ambitious law enforcement technology projects in American history, a centralized digital database designed to hold the fingerprint records of every arrested individual in the country and make them searchable from any participating agency.

The system launched on July twenty-eighth, nineteen ninety-nine, at a cost of six hundred forty million dollars.

A latent print lifted from a crime scene in Nebraska could be compared against the fingerprint records of every person who had ever been booked into a participating system anywhere in the United States.

The transformation was staggering.

Before IAFIS, a fingerprint comparison request sent to the FBI took an average of several weeks to process.

After IAFIS, electronic submissions could be returned in two hours or less.

Um, but it wasn't long after that that I was able to get, you know, my first kind of professional job, uh, there in...

You know, I helped, um, develop the, what was called the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, IAFIS, which was their first, um, large scale fingerprint system.

I mean, the revolutionary capabilities that that provided, you know, before that for like a crime scene fingerprint search, they would actually ring a bell because it was so rare that they would go out and search all those files and actually find a match.

Um, but we were guaranteeing, um, you know, um, response times within twenty-four hours, searching, you know, massive amounts of, uh, fingerprint data, um, with, uh, crime scene data.

But then, after two years of deafening silence, in 2007, FBI Special Agent Bill Kirkconnell decided to take on Benjamin's case.

He collected Benjamin's fingerprints and ran them through IAFIS, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, the largest fingerprint database in the world.

There's more than 60 million criminal fingerprints on file and more than 200 million civil prints on file.

I thought there was an excellent chance that, you know, maybe Benjamin had a criminal history.