court

court, evidence, voice

US: Federal prosecutors want to use voice biometrics in court

Prosecutors want to use hi-tech evidence in trial to identify voices of terrorists (Daily Mail)

Terrorism prosecutors in Brooklyn want to use sophisticated voice recognition evidence — the same technology used to identify ISIS butcher “Jihad John” — for the first time in a federal trial in the U.S., the Daily News has learned.

The novel part of this that prosecutors wish to use the technology in a Federal trial.

Voice biometrics have made news in a criminal trial before. This 2012 piece by Jeff Weiner of the Orlando Sentinel describes voice biometrics used by an expert witness in the trial of George Zimmerman.

court, Israel, law, national ID

Israel High Court of Justice on Biometric Database Pilot

Hight Court: Biometric database should be changed (Jerusalem Post)

The petitioners said the ministry should examine whether a central database was in fact needed and whether there were other options that could prevent data leaks or information theft.

Though the court rejected the petition as premature because the pilot has not yet run, Justices Miriam Naor, Hanan Melcer and Isaac Amit also accepted the petitioners’ arguments that the state must rework its planned pilot of the program to evaluate whether it is necessary to store the population’s biometric data in a single, centralized database.

The Interior Ministry has been planning for years to replace existing ID cards with ones containing biometric data, and in 2009, the Knesset approved the biometric data law that allowed the initiative to move forward.