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18 AUTOMATED FINGERPRINT IDENTIFICATION SYSTEMS

state taxpayers. There is no easy answer to this problem. In addition, employ-
ees may rightly be concerned about who in their business or agency has access
to this information, which may not be treated with the same confidentiality as
medical records.
Another AFIS issue concerns the procedures regarding record retention.
Although in the past, the standard procedure was for the inquiring party to
return records to the identification agency, increasingly it is to retain them. For
example, if a person was fingerprinted for a job application for which the
record was to be retained, the inked impressions were returned to the inquirer
along with the search results. No finger images of the applicant were retained
by the identification agency. Another inquiry about that person in the future
might be treated as a new inquiry, since no finger image record would exist to
positively identify him or her as the same person.

1.10 WHY THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN
Remarkably, very little has been written about AFIS systems. A great deal has
been written about various biometrics and the accuracy of certain biometric
applications; likewise, a great body of knowledge exists on fingerprints, their
history as an identification tool, and their uniqueness in the identification
process. But publications describing the automated fingerprint identification
process and its characteristics and opportunities are difficult to find, and
the amount of published information about the advances made in the latent
fingerprint identifications through the use of AFIS systems is even more
miniscule.
This book attempts to fill this gap. It describes how the AFIS system works,
why it works, how it came to be, and what lies in the future. There are chal-
lenges that must be addressed and issues to be resolved. There are also oppor-
tunities for better, faster, and less expensive fingerprint identifications using
AFIS systems. Some suggestions in that arena are included.
This book also provides the reader with a better understanding of the com-
plexities of biometric identification, particularly the identification process that
uses fingerprints. Regardless of the biometric in use, the process involves
people, technology, and processes. Each of these three elements is subject to
error. The error can come in the form of a human mistake, such as entering
an erroneous code, poor maintenance that causes computers to fail, or inap-
propriate processing procedures that miss certain types of identification. Few
things in life are infallible or absolute.
Recent events have changed the attitudes of many regarding security and
personal identification and, by design, who should be fingerprinted. Although