DUNEDIN, FLORIDA – The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office confirmed this week that images taken from Florida drivers’ licenses have now been integrated into a multi-jurisdictional facial recognition database used by law enforcement agencies throughout Florida.
Since January 1, 2010, the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (DHSMV) has been in full compliance with the Real ID Act of 2005. This federal law, administered by the Department of Homeland Security, mandates that states “subject each person applying for a driver’s license or identification card to mandatory facial image capture.” These facial image caputures are required to be compatible with facial recognition software. The law also requires that these facial image captures be combined with digital scans of identification documents, such as birth certificates and social security cards, and be uploaded to a national database.
“We are in a pilot program with DHSMV,” said Scott McCallum, Administrator of Facial Recognition Systems for the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office (PCSO). “We also have the ability to perform a [facial recognition] search against the civilian repository, the drivers’ license data set,” McCallum said, “we’ve been able to go ahead and verify identity in near real time at street level.”
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