Page 286 - Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS)

APPENDIX B: INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR IDENTIFICATION 271

The AFIS Committee consists of leaders in fingerprinting from state and
local law enforcement, the FBI, the National Institute of Standards and Tech-
nology (NIST) and private industry. Participating in the demonstrations were
three major AFIS vendors—Cogent Systems, Printrak International and Sagem
Morpho, along with Aware, who used their commercially available Electronic
Fingerprint Transmission Specification (EFTS) Software, and the National Law
Enforcement Transmission System (NLETS) who provided access to their frame
relay network.
In 1997, testing was conducted to and from vendor facilities using the Inter-
net as the transmission medium. Although the Internet is not a transmission
medium of choice for regular law enforcement use due to security implications,
the Internet allowed us to prove the feasibility of transmission using the Simple
Management Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and Multipurpose Internet Mail Exten-
sions (MIME), required for the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information System
(CJIS) Wide Area Network (WAN) and for potential application outside the
criminal justice area.
This year, after regression testing on the Internet, we moved the tests from
a simulation of vendor sites over the Internet to operational customer sites over
the NLETS frame relay network. Sites that were not already directly connected
to the NLETS network were given dial-up access to the central NLETS site.
Testing was successful and further proved the AFIS Committee’s theory that
today searches can be run across jurisdictional and AFIS vendor boundaries.
It was also shown that simply because a vendor is FBI certified for certain
areas and considered standards-compliant doesn’t necessarily guarantee inter-
operability with other vendors. The FBI’s Electronic Fingerprint Transmission
Specification (EFTS) document was crucial to interoperability for it defined a
common implementation of the ANSI-NIST standard within which vendors
could communicate, but we also needed to modify certain aspects of the trans-
actions to make it applicable to cross-jurisdictional use (see Appendix C).
This testing has not been funded by the IAI or any outside source. All who par-
ticipate do so at their own expense of staff time, equipment, travel and other
expenses. The Committee Chair extends many thanks to the three AFIS vendors
who contributed significant resource investments: Cogent Systems, Printrak Inter-
national and Sagem Morpho. Thanks to Aware who did the same. Thanks to
NLETS who accommodated our testing during a period of their own upgrade
testing and contributed the extra equipment we needed at no cost to us. And special
thanks to the three operational sites that graciously supported the live testing.
This project, conceived 2 years ago at the IAI 81st Annual Educational
Seminar, will be discussed by a Panel at this year’s IAI 83rd Annual Educational
Seminar in July at Little Rock, Arkansas. For more information, see the IAI-
AFIS Committee home page at http://www.iaibbs.org/afis.htm or contact Peter
Higgins or Cynthia Way at 202-625-7780.