The shoebox-shaped device, designed to capture fingerprints and perform iris scans, was listed for sale on eBay for $149.95. A German security researcher, Matthias Marx, successfully bid $68, and when he arrived at his Hamburg home in August, the robust portable machine contained more than what was promised on the listing.
The device’s memory card contained the names, nationalities, photographs, fingerprints and iris scans of 2,632 people.
Most of the people in the database, which was reviewed by The New York Times, were from Afghanistan and Iraq. Many were known terrorists and wanted persons, but others appeared to be people who had worked with the US government or had simply been stopped at checkpoints. Metadata from the device, called the Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit, or SEEK II, revealed that it had last been used in the summer of 2012 near Kandahar, Afghanistan.
The device, a relic of the vast biometric collection system the Pentagon built in the years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, is a physical reminder that while the United States has overcome the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the tools built to fight against them and the information they kept unintentionally by their creators.
It’s unclear exactly how the device ended up making its way from battlefields in Asia to an online auction site. But the data, which offers detailed descriptions of people in addition to their photo and biometric data, could be enough to target people previously not known to have worked with the US military should the information fall through the cracks. wrong hands.
For those reasons, Marx would not post the information online or share it in an electronic format, but he allowed a New York Times reporter in Germany to view the data in person with him.
“Because we have not reviewed the information contained in the devices, the department cannot confirm the authenticity of the purported data or otherwise comment on it,” Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, Defense Department press secretary, said in a statement. release. “The department requests that any device believed to contain personally identifiable information be returned for further analysis.”
He provided an address for the manager of the Army’s biometrics program at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, where the devices could be shipped.
SEEK II biometric data was collected at detention centers during local employee screenings and after an improvised bomb explosion. Around the time the device was last used in Afghanistan, the American war effort there was waning. Osama bin Laden had been assassinated in Pakistan a year earlier; his identity was reportedly confirmed using facial recognition technology.
