Here’s a story that sounds like sci-fi: Every law enforcement agency in Cochise County will soon use iris-scanning technology to identify people. And it’s the same iris scanning technology that’s already being used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
It’s raising questions about how this biometric data will be used — and by who.
Jerod MacDonald-Evoy has the story for The Arizona Mirror and joined The Show to talk more.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, Jerod
JEROD MCDONALD-EVOY: Good morning.
LAUREN GILGER: Okay. So, iris scanning technology sounds like science fiction, but it turns out this is not new. What is it used for?
JEROD MCDONALD-EVOY: Yeah. So, this technology, it's by the Massachusetts-based BI2 Technologies. It's called the Inmate Recognition and Identification System, or IRIS for short. What it does is it's kind of like, if you think of the movie “Minority Report” where they scan the person's eye and it gives them the identification. That's, in short, what it does.
It uses biometric markers within a person's iris to identify who they are. And the idea behind it, in this sense and that a lot of law enforcement agencies have used it for, is helping identify people within jails or prisons.
LAUREN GILGER: OK. So, exactly how does it work? Like, the company you mentioned there says it has a database of like a million scanned irises. They match them?
JEROD MCDONALD-EVOY: Correct. So, they have, they claim to have this database where they have millions, a million scanned irises. These are from people who have been incarcerated in other parts of the country or people who have maybe given their scans via other means.
But we don't have a ton of information on exactly how they have this database, what exactly it consists of, how accurate it is. But we know that they have this major database of these irises that they use that law enforcement uses when they, say, they arrest someone or they bring someone into a jail to be processed.
They'll scan that eye, that person's eye and it will be checked against this database. If it's not in that database, then they'll be added to that database for future reference.
LAUREN GILGER: OK. What about this part, the company kind of has a platform that allows officers to even use their cellphones to scan the irises of people that they encounter?
JEROD MCDONALD-EVOY: Correct. They have a different version of this software that's mobile that ICE has purchased a contract for that allows them to use their cellphones, basically like an app, where that they can they can try to verify someone's identity in the field, see if that person is.
The reason ICE really wants this is so they can verify if that person is the person they're looking for or if that person is, you know, someone that is in the country illegally that they want to deport.
And that part of the contract that ICE is looking for with this particular vendor is to give agents in the field or their 287(g) partners, so local law enforcement that have immigration enforcement authority, to be able to identify people during operations and hand them over to ICE.
LAUREN GILGER: Right. And that's one of the big questions here, right, about how Cochise County, how local law enforcement agencies like these might use technology like this, how they might coordinate with ICE.
Any indication if they will? They do have a 287(g) contract they entered into last year.
JEROD MCDONALD-EVOY: Correct. They did enter into that agreement last year. Cochise County did not respond to my requests asking how this program will be implemented exactly. They do say that it's going to be part of the jails and it will be used by every, like you said at the top of the segment, every single law enforcement agency within the county. So, every law enforcement agency will have access to it within their own jails and will have access to the database.
And they'll be using this. We don't know if ICE will have back-end access to this or if they'll get notified if, you know, someone that they're looking for shows up in the system because ICE will already be using the system.
So, it's unclear how those partnerships will work and how that will tie into the 287(g) agreement that Cochise County has already entered into with ICE.
LAUREN GILGER: There are connections you found as well, Jerod, between this company and the Trump administration in terms of some important lobbyists, right?
JEROD MCDONALD-EVOY: Correct. The Project On Government Oversight investigates, they had a great report where they found that shortly after Trump was elected to his second term, there was a company that was hired, the company that got this contract hired some lobbyists that are connected to this second administration.
Susie Wiles, who is now Trump's chief of staff, and former Attorney General Pam Bondi used to work at this firm. Susie Wiles actually opened, was one of the people who helped open this place, Ballard Partners, and they lobbied hard to get this contract for ICE to be, for this company to be the sole contract for ICE to do this biometric data.
And they also found that this company offered border sheriffs free use of this technology for three years during the first Trump administration. So, they've been kind of heavily involved within the Trump administration and within the border sheriff community, kind of trying to get their technology in the hands of these sheriffs and these law enforcement enforcement entities.
LAUREN GILGER: Jerod, how accurate is this iris scanning technology, though? I mean, and how private is it? It seems like there are some questions about how well it's been used in the past.
JEROD MCDONALD-EVOY: Yeah, that's something the privacy advocates have brought up. Studies by, you know, the National Institute of Standards and Technology have found that the miss rate can be anywhere between 2% to 20%. So, it's, it's not entirely sure how accurate the technology exactly is.
Research has also found that, you know, you could trick this technology even with like, say, a printed out on paper version of an iris. They took, you know, they took a copy of an iris scan and they printed it out on a piece of paper and they put it up to that scanner and they were able to trick it. But then they've also found other ways to bypass these.
But they've also been found to have errors, and then also they've been found to be not always secure, whether that be from human error, like a device that was sold on eBay that was a military device back in 2022, or these devices being abandoned, like in Afghanistan, because these were primarily first used by the military during the war on terror.
A large number of these were abandoned during that withdrawal from Afghanistan, and, you know, there were concerns about the Taliban getting their hands on this technology and using it to connect people to people that helped the United States during that conflict.
LAUREN GILGER: Absolutely. All right, we'll leave it there. Jerod McDonald-Evoy with the Arizona Mirror joining us. Jerod, thank you for your reporting here. Appreciate it very much.
JEROD MCDONALD-EVOY: No problem. Thank you for having me on.
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