Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Criminal Justice Identification in the Cloud


Courts have an unending problem with criminal defendant identification.  If one thinks about this issue for a minute, in many instances it is a benefit to the defendant to not be properly identified.  As most of you know, there have been biometric systems (fingerprint, face recognition for example) available for law enforcement, prosecutors, and courts for many years.  But there has been a significant initial cost barrier.  Last week I saw an interesting possible “cloud based” solution that may help.




---

An article posted BiometricUpdate.com on March 21, 2016 noted that a major biometric identification company, MorphoTrak  has built “a new service paradigm known as ‘identification-as-a-service’” in the cloud.  It is called not surprisingly, “Morpho Cloud”.  The article continues:

“Morpho Cloud is designed to deliver MorphoTrak’s flagship biometric identification solution, known as MorphoBIS, to government agencies, as well as its state and local law enforcement customers, online through secure architecture. The MorphoBIS suite is a comprehensive range of products centered on an innovative automated biometric identification system that provides real­time identification of suspects and criminals. In addition to fingerprint, palmprint, and facial recognition, the MorphoBIS suite offers tattoo recognition, and voice recognition, as well as Morpho Cloud­supported services, including video analytics as­ a­ service, disaster recovery as ­a ­service, and Rap Back as­ a­ service.”

Intestingly, MorphoTrak uses Microsoft’s Azure Government platform that has “stringent security measures built directly into” the application.  Further “both Microsoft and MorphoTrak “comply with CJIS Security Policy which provides both U.S. law enforcement and non-law enforcement entities with a specific set of security requirements for access to information systems and data”.

The great benefit I see it that a local justice system could potentially bypass many of the cost barriers of buying the server, storage, secure network, and related costs.  It also allows for try before buying decisions since it even the scanning/digital photography hardware could potentially be rented for the test period.

It is very exciting what the cloud potentially allows us to accomplish in a short time period.


No comments:

Post a Comment