OLMITO — As if on cue, an incoming call interrupted Omar Lucio midsentence as the sheriff of Cameron County extolled the virtues of the latest biometric recognition technology.

Using the recently acquired Inmate Recognition and Identification System, or IRIS, the county jail had just exposed the true identity of a man wanted by the FBI for a list of offenses.

“We got one,” Lucio beamed. “Our first.”

Lucio celebrated the addition of IRIS, with its fingerprint and facial-recognition capabilities, describing it as an indispensable tool for detecting criminals. During an annual meeting in early April, the Southwestern Border Sheriffs’ Coalition unanimously voted to partner with Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies and to adopt the company’s biometric program.

The Cameron County Sheriff’s Office and the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office have since deployed the technology. Eventually, all 31 sheriffs’ offices along the U.S.-Mexico border will implement the BI2 Technologies system, free of charge for three years. To help cover the rollout cost of $2,500 per device per year across all border jurisdictions, the coalition is seeking additional federal funds.

“We arrest a lot of people with names and features similar to others in the community,” Lucio said. “The beauty of IRIS is there is nothing that person can do to lie about their identity.”

Not everyone shares Lucio’s enthusiasm for a technology that intends to catalog and compare iris data. Since its rollout in July, the technology has been touted for its potential to fight illegal immigration and drug trafficking organizations, sparking concerns that counties might use the IRIS recognition program to determine legal status.

Under the Fourth Amendment, it is understood that law enforcement can fingerprint people in custody and that DNA can be collected and analyzed in a federal database. But the IRIS program is not part of a federal database, nor is it being used by all U.S. law enforcement agencies, leaving gaps in the system and raising questions about oversight.

It also is unclear how the company might respond to the threat of hacks or leaks of sensitive information and whether the accuracy of BI2 Technologies data will be subject to scrutiny.

“The fact that something might pass Fourth Amendment muster doesn’t mean there aren’t concerns about whether it is the right approach,” said Jennifer Laurin, a law professor at the University of Texas whose research focuses on the intersection of criminal and constitutional litigation and on regulation of criminal justice institutions. “It’s not paranoid. It’s empirically borne out that the use of these law enforcement tools is an expansive one.”

Sean Mullin, president and CEO of BI2 Technologies, argues that IRIS technology has been up and running for about 10 years and is being used in law enforcement agencies across 47 states. Its growing appeal is its ease of use, accuracy and speedy results. Over the past year, officials say, the IRIS program has detected more than 16,100 people who provided law enforcement with a false identity.

The technology is set up for an individual to look into a device roughly the size of a smartphone while a law enforcement official snaps a digital photo. An image appears on a monitor before it is sent into the BI2 system to be compared against the company’s data archive. If the person has been scanned before, a match will be made within seconds.

By comparison, it can take days for results from fingerprints to return from the Texas Department of Public Safety in Austin or the Automated Fingerprint Identification System used by the FBI. The AFIS uses digital imaging technology to store and analyze fingerprint data, but wear and tear can alter a fingerprint over time, Mullin explained, offering the example of a bricklayer’s hands.

For its part, the FBI launched an Iris Pilot program in September 2013, a component of the agency’s Next Generation Identification system, a federal database of biometric information, including voice patterns and facial patterns. Participation is voluntary and limited in scope. Additionally, the FBI requires state controlling agencies to sign a memorandum of understanding before local agencies can participate.

Everything the BI2 iris system does is certified according to the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services standards, Mullin said, adding that his company is in discussions with the DPS and many other state agencies to adopt the BI2 Technologies program. However, the FBI has no relationship with BI2 and its IRIS technology, the agency said.

“My guess, over the next five to 10 years, this technology is just going to take off,” Mullin said.

The company says its technology cannot be gathered covertly, nor can law enforcement coerce an individual to give an iris scan. The biometric data is run against all other data on the company’s privately run Tier 3 Defense Department encrypted database in an undisclosed location in Texas.

“It behaves like a government system,” Mullin said. “And it’s very, very secure.”

Some have questioned what, other than identity, the IRIS recognition data might reveal about a person. Others worry that the technology will disproportionately affect immigrant communities and could lead to racial profiling, especially of Spanish-speaking Latinos.

Technology frequently outpaces the Fourth Amendment, according to legal experts. Once in place, surveillance technology might easily be expanded to include field-based collection, raising privacy and civil rights concerns.

“The most important step right now is for the sheriff’s office to be transparent with their communities,” said Matt Cagle, technology and civil liberties policy attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in Northern California. “There should be public debate about what they are doing, and where this data is going.”

The ACLU has requested public records from every sheriff along the border with Mexico, inquiring about their plans to use iris recognition technology.

Lawrence “Larry” Guerra, executive director of the border sheriffs coalition, said concerns are unfounded. While IRIS technology cannot be used to gather biometric information covertly, he said, for sheriffs on the border, where people sometimes use aliases to avoid being identified, the program could prove essential.

“Border sheriffs are on the front line of transnational criminal activity,” Guerra said. “This is another tool to help keep communities safe.”

For now, the sheriff’s office in Cameron County only enters data into the BI2 system after a person has been arrested and booked into jail. Lucio offered up his county to be the first to pilot the technology.

In late August, jailers in Cameron County caught an impostor. The man, who claimed to be from Puerto Rico, was taken into custody on state charges of tampering with government evidence and filing a false application for a driver’s license. A photo of his eyes were entered into the iris system, and a match was made under a different name.

“It turns out he is from the Dominican Republic,” sheriff’s Lt. Joe Elizardi said. “He’s going into federal custody, and they’re going to be working a case on him which involves kidnapping, human smuggling and drugs.”

As long as the program keeps generating significant hits in his jurisdiction, Sheriff Lucio sees no reason why a continued partnership with BI2 Technologies should be cause for concern.

“What do we have to lose?” Lucio said.

Article written by Aaron Nelsen