You know how it's supposed to work. There's a movie about the future with a bad guy and some good guys. The good guys scan a picture of the bad guy into a computer, the computer quickly cross-references the image against enormous, ominous databases, up pops his name, and they go after him.

Not so much in real life.

For a few hours each year, during the Boston Marathon, the 600 block of Boylston Street is the most photographed place on Earth, what with all the family, friends, tourists, news crews, and commercial photographers. So it was a perfect setting for the FBI to make use of facial-recognition technology. But even though Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev's images existed in official databases, the brothers were not identified that way—because we just aren't that advanced yet.

Facial-recognition technology turns a photograph into a biometric template that can be matched with photos attached to names in other databases. Last summer, the FBI launched a $1 billion facial-recognition program called the Next Generation Identification (NGI) project as a pilot in several states. Once fully implemented, the security program is designed to include some 12 million searchable mug shots as well as voice recognition and iris scans. The FBI would not confirm if the program is being piloted in Massachusetts, but even if it were, it may not have been useful since it is unclear whether the brothers had criminal records. But the FBI also has access to the State Department's passport and visa facial-recognition databases, and can get similar DMV information from the 30-odd states that have it, including Massachusetts. Both brothers had Massachusetts driver's licenses, so it would seem they would be traceable. (Tamerlan's name was also included in a federal government travel-screening database in 2011 after the FBI investigated him for possible terrorist activity at Russia's request, but the government's databases related to immigration, customs, and border-related interactions do not yet have facial-recognition capabilities.)

Continue reading at: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/04/facial-recognition-technolo...