Private security

How the CIA Secretly Collects Biometric Data

The whistleblowing site WikiLeaks recently published a cache of documents that reveal, among other things, the existence of several online programs employed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to gather biometric data collected by the spies’ sister agencies.

Using a cyber tool called ExpressLane, the CIA, according to the information dumped by WikiLeaks, infiltrates the various surreptitiously seized and catalogued biometric databases kept by the National Security Agency (NSA), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

According to WikiLeaks’ description of the application, it was installed without being detected by the liaison officers of the other federal agencies because it was packaged as part of a scheduled upgrade.

This latest evidence of the uncovered unconstitutional violation of the Fourth Amendment by our own government was a small part of the reams and reams (some 8,761 documents) of information released in March by WikiLeaks as part of its “Vault 7 Project.”