FBI Wish List: An App That Can Recognize the Meaning of Your Tattoos

We’ve long known that the FBI is heavily invested in developing face recognition technology as a key component in its criminal investigations. But new records, obtained by EFF through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, show that’s not the only biometric marker the agency has its eyes on. The FBI’s wish list also includes image recognition technology and mobile devices to attempt to use tattoos to map out people’s relationships and identify their beliefs.

EFF began looking at tattoo recognition technology in 2015, after discovering that the National Institute for Standards & Technology (NIST), in collaboration with the FBI, was promoting experiments using tattoo images gathered involuntarily from prison inmates and arrestees. The agencies had provided a dataset of thousands of prisoner tattoos to some 19 outside groups, including companies and academic institutions, that are developing image recognition and biometric technology. Government officials instructed the groups to demonstrate how the technology could be used to identify people by their tattoos and match tattoos with similar imagery.

Our investigation found that NIST was targeting people who shared common beliefs, with a heavy emphasis on religious imagery.  NIST researchers, we discovered, had also bypassed basic oversight measures. Despite rigid requirements designed to protect prisoners who might be used as subjects in government research, the researchers failed to seek sign-off from the in-house watchdog before embarking on the project.

Following our report, NIST stopped responding to EFF’s FOIA requests. The agency also rushed to retroactively alter its documents to downplay the nature of the research. In a statement issued to the press, NIST denied our findings, claiming that its goal was simply to evaluate the effectiveness of tattoo recognition algorithms and “not about the many complex law enforcement policies or approaches that may be related to images of tattoos.”

This claim rings especially hollow now that the FBI has released email communications and slide presentations with NIST in response to our FOIA suit. 

Read the FBI records provided in response to our FOIA litigation. 

Among the records were two previously withheld presentations from FBI divisions focused on deciphering tattoos that were delivered at a special event organized by NIST for participants in the research project. 

What the FBI “Wants” and “Needs”

 While the FBI has long used a rudimentary system called TAG-IMAGE to use tattoos to identify people, according to the presentation, "It does NOT [sic] attempt to answer the question 'What does it mean?'" Officials told the roomful of government, academic, and corporate researchers assembled by NIST that the FBI is seeking to establish “affiliation” using tattoo images.  This means identifying “gang membership, terrorist relevance, location, [and] symbols description/meaning.”

One particularly alarming presentation by the chief of the FBI’s Cryptanalysis & Racketeering Records Unit was titled, “Tattoo, Graffiti, and Symbol Recognition: A Codebreakers Perspective.” It began with a graphic of exclusively religious symbols, including Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Taoist iconography.

 A subsequent slide was even more ominous. The headline read: “We want a one stop database to tell us what a symbol means.”

The presentation went onto explain that the FBI currently uses open-source resources to decipher the meanings of symbols and tattoos. These include the Anti-Defamation League’s Hate on Display database,  the University of Michigan’s Science Fiction and Fantasy “Dictionary of Symbolism,” and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s website. 

The heavily redacted presentation included bl