Afghans in peril if Taliban gets U.S. biometric devices
In the wake of the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul and the ouster of the Afghan national government, alarming reports indicate that the insurgents could potentially access biometric data collected by the United States to track Afghans, including those who worked for U.S. and coalition forces.
Afghans who once supported the United States have been trying to hide or destroy physical and digital evidence of their identities. Many fear that the identity documents and databases storing personally identifiable data could be transformed into death warrants by the Taliban.
This underscores that data protection in zones of conflict, especially biometric data and databases that connect online activity to physical locations, can be a matter of life and death.
My research and the work of journalists and privacy advocates who study biometric cybersurveillance anticipated these risks.
Investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen documented the birth of biometricdriven warfare in Afghanistan following the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, in her book “First Platoon.” The Department of Defense quickly viewed biometric data and what it called “identity dominance” as the cornerstone of multiple counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies. Identity dominance means being able to keep track of people the military considers potential threats regardless of aliases and, ultimately, denying organizations the ability to use anonymity to hide their activities.
By 2004, thousands of U.S. military personnel had been trained to collect biometric data to support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. By 2007, U.S. forces were collecting biometric data primarily through mobile devices such as the Biometric Automated Toolset (BAT) and Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE). BAT includes a laptop, fingerprint reader, iris scanner and camera. HIIDE is a single small device that incorporates a fingerprint reader, iris scanner and camera. Users collect iris and fingerprint scans and facial photos, then match them to entries in military databases and biometric watchlists.
The system also includes biographic and contextual data such as criminal and terrorist watchlist records, letting users to determine if an individual is flagged in the system as a suspect. Intelligence analysts can use the system to monitor people’s movements and activities by tracking biometric data recorded by troops in the field.
By 2011, a decade after 9/11, the Department of Defense maintained approximately 4.8 million biometric records of people in Afghanistan and
Iraq, with about 630,000 of the records collected using HIIDE devices. In addition, the U.S. Army and its military partners in the Afghan government were using biometricenabled intelligence or biometric cyberintelligence on the battlefield to identify and track insurgents.
Over the years, the Department of Defense aimed to create a biometric database on 80% of the Afghan population, approximately 32 million people at today’s population level. It is unclear how close the military came to this goal.
And the Department of Defense and the Afghan government eventually adopted the technologies for a range of day-to-day governmental uses, including gathering evidence for criminal prosecution, clearing Afghan workers for employment and enhancing election security.
In addition, the Afghan National ID system and voter-registration databases contained sensitive data, including ethnicity information. The Afghan ID, the e-Tazkira, is an electronic identification document that includes biometric data, which increases the privacy risks posed by Taliban access to the National ID system.
It’s too soon after the Taliban’s return to power to know whether, and to what extent, the Taliban will be able to commandeer the biometric data once held by the U.S. military. One report suggested that the Taliban may not be able to access that collected through HIIDE because they lack the technical capacity. However, it’s possible the Taliban could turn to longtime ally Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, for help. Like many national intelligence services, ISI likely has the necessary technology.
Another report indicated that the Taliban have already started to deploy a “biometrics machine” to conduct “house-to-house inspections” to identify former Afghan officials and security forces. This is consistent with prior Afghan news reports that described the Taliban subjecting bus passengers to biometric screening and using biometric data to target Afghan security forces for kidnapping and assassination.
For years following 9/11, researchers, activists and policymakers raised concerns that the mass collection, storage and analysis of sensitive biometric data posed dangers to privacy rights and human rights. Clearly, those concerns were not unfounded. They reveal potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities in the U.S. military’s biometric systems.
The data privacy and cybersecurity concerns surrounding Taliban access to U.S. and former Afghan government databases are a warning for the future. In building biometric-driven warfare technologies and protocols, it appears that the
U.S. Department of Defense assumed the Afghan government would have the minimum level of stability needed to protect the data.
The U.S. military should assume that any sensitive information — biometric and biographical data, wiretap data and communications, geolocation data, government records — could potentially fall into enemy hands. In addition to building robust security to protect against unauthorized access, the Pentagon should question whether it was necessary to collect the biometric data in the first instance.
Understanding the unintended consequences of the U.S. experiment in biometric-driven warfare and biometric cyberintelligence is critically important for determining whether, and how, the military should collect biometric information. The biometric data that the
U.S. military and the Afghan government had been using to track the Taliban could one day soon — if it’s not already — be used by the Taliban to track Afghans who supported the United States.