SEARCHING
FBI RECORDS FOR CLUES
Past and Present
06/17/05
It’s 1957 and
our “Service Unit” gets the following request:
“In about
1928 the Bureau received a letter from a magazine editor. The name
of the magazine is known; however, the name of the editor is not. Only
fragmentary information concerning the contents of the letter is known. ‘Find
the letter’ is the request. It is somewhere among 5 million files,
the key to its location being in approximately 46 million index cards,
millions of abstracts, a knowledge of records management procedures
used by the FBI in 1928, and an unlimited number of reference books
and publications.”
Whew! That’s
a lot of manual searching to “find the letter” that could
make or break an FBI case!
Today, the FBI has
dozens of computerized systems that enable us to find investigative information
at lightning speed. Many of them are connected and accessible throughout
the world from secure computers. Here are just a few examples:
Putting Terror
on the Run. The Investigative Data Warehouse provides a single
access point to more than 47 sources of counterterrorism data and 100
million pages of international terrorism-related documents for our
agents and analysts. Searches that took days to finish now take minutes,
and major projects that once took months can now be done in just a
few days.
Intelligence
at Our Fingertips. IntelPlus—created in 1994—stores
more than 42 million scanned documents and photos from FBI cases. It
enables us to run fast full-text searches and to quickly and easily
share intelligence among field offices, FBI Headquarters, and multi-agency
task forces.
Finding Fingerprints…Fast: We’ve
got nearly 50 million criminal fingerprints and corresponding criminal
histories on file, and they can be searched and matched electronically
in minutes by federal agents and local officers—thanks to the Integrated
Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or IAFIS. We processed
our first prints through IAFIS in July 1999 and our 100 millionth last
month.
Genetic Fingerprints,
too: More than 2.5 million DNA profiles from 174 labs around
the country are housed in a national database and shared electronically
through our Lab’s Combined
DNA Index System, or CODIS, enabling searches that help
link crime scenes and identify suspects nationwide. Through April,
CODIS has aided nearly 24,000 investigations and helped link DNA profiles
from crime scenes to convicted felons over 16,000 times.
These systems—and
many more like them—are improving our ability to share intelligence,
solve crimes, and prevent terrorist attacks every day.
And what happened
in the 1957 search described above? The letter—dated
1922—was found and delivered in time!
