Law enforcement agencies at the local, state, and federal levels have leveraged technology for decades. Beginning in the 1800s and continuing today, advances in the area of forensics have helped investigators to identify suspects through fingerprints, hair and fibers, blood types, and DNA.

Those same technological advances have led to the collection of vast amounts of data. In February 2020, the National DNA Index (NDIS) contained more than 14 million offender profiles, 3.8 million arrestee profiles, and 1 million forensic profiles, according to the FBI. The FBI’s Next Generation Identification System (NGI), which recently replaced the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, houses the fingerprints and criminal histories of more than 70 million subjects.