What ya' gonna' do when they come for you?

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/fbifingerprints/

An underground fingerprint lab in West Virginia is the nexus point for every crime committed in the country and even for some committed overseas.

The FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services building in Clarksburg houses a multibillion-dollar computer system that processes 600 billion fingerprint sets a day, according to a CBS news reporter who visited the lab. (Correction: It’s actually more like 200,000. See update below). The prints come in 24 hours a day from crime scenes around the country, as well as from overseas, such as in Iraq where prints lifted from IED explosives are sent to CJIS to match against known terrorist suspects.

Agents in the field use wireless scanners to transmit fingerprint samples to the center, where matches can be returned as quickly as seven seconds.

The facility also processes fingerprint searches on travelers scanned at border entry points under the U.S. Visit program, as well as on teachers, day-care center employees, government workers and others who must undergo background checks for their jobs.

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