Penguins of Afghanistan

Penguins of Afghanistan
and
A few Words on Charlie Company

Published: 13 May 2010

There are no birth certificates in these villages.  No death certificates.  No driver’s licenses or addresses or phonebooks, and if there were, few people would be able to read them.  In this mostly illiterate country, there are no paperwork hassles.  Corruption is a problem but bureaucracy and identity theft surely aren’t.  Most Afghans have never been entered into any system.  Like penguins on the ice, they are born, they live and they die, and that’s all.

Whereas most Westerners have been thorougly inventoried by their governments (readers probably have many sorts of IDs ranging from birth certificates to fishing licenses), Afghans are still in the Penguin stage.  They’re just out there doing laps around the sun.  Most don’t know how many laps because they don’t know how old they are, and it’s not because they are orphans but because it doesn’t matter one iota.  A kid can drive when he can drive and shoot when he can shoot.

To take inventory, the military is using systems that soldiers often call “bats and hides,” or, more accurately, BAT and HIIDE, which are two different systems for collecting biometrics.   BAT= Biometrics Automated Toolset, while HIIDE = Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment.  This dispatch is about field usage of the HIIDE system made by www.securimetrics.com.

The HIIDE takes a photo, and software analyzes the face.

Photo, retina scan, fingerprints and text data make a record.

According to Staff Sergeant Jason Hughes, "ZZ Top beards" can inhibit the software from classifying faces, but usually, he says, the image is successful.  If not, soldiers use a separate digital camera to make a photo and add to the record.

Never had an ID card in his life.

Years ago, an old Special Forces team sergeant, Glenn Watson, who did three tours in Vietnam, retired and got a job.

He worked for NEC managing projects that implemented a system called AFIS, or Automated Fingerprint Identification System.  Whenever the chance arose, I would go visit my old team sergeant in Georgia or Pennsylvania where he helped install AFIS for each state.  Bottom line: during visits Glenn gave me grand tours and “briefings” about how the system works.

Some states were digitizing their massive collections of fingerprint files.  Huge amounts data.  There were truckloads fingerprint cards in each state.  In the old days, police would roll fingerprints on the paper cards, but to link a suspect to a latent print, they needed a clue to an actual suspect, and checking had to be done by hand.  So, let’s say a murder occurred and perfect fingerprints were lifted but there was no suspect.  The police might have arrested the murderer years ago for something else, so all his data was on file, but for practical purposes, on a national level, the files were unsearchable.  Law enforcement would have two perfect dots but no way to connect them.

In Atlanta, Glenn showed me a huge room of computer workstations.  The air conditioner kept the place very cold, to the point where all the women (most or all were women) who worked there had to wear sweaters or jackets.  They were scanning fingerprint cards into the AFIS system and entering the personal information into the data fields.  The fingerprints would then pop up on a computer screen (much as seen in these photos with the HIIDE) and the software would do its magic with the minutiae.  I was familiar with minutiae and whatnot from Special Forces training; we learned to fingerprint people and how to read the minutiae.  The upshot in Atlanta was that after the fingerprints were digitized, law enforcement could cross-check all the “latent prints” (prints left at a crime scene) against the entire database.  Glenn said that even as they were still scanning in the truckloads of fingerprint cards, AFIS was getting “hits” on latent prints from crime scenes that were years old.  Crimes that would have gone unsolved were suddenly active.

In Iraq, our people were also using these biometrics capture systems.  Anyone who was detained/arrested was entered, as was everyone who wanted a job with the Coalition.  Data was also collected from bombs, weapons, phones and so forth.  During a police recruitment drive in Anbar Province, the applicants were lined up and I recall one scanned in and there was a hit.  The soldiers quietly detained him away from the others.

When the HIIDE system is brought back to base, or maybe to a sufficently outfitted vehicle, it can be connected to the main system to download/upload.

Each device has internal memory with a database of photos, retina scans and prints.  The computer within the HIIDE will go ahead and scan what is entered against its internal database.  So, as our folks scan people in the villagers, if they were to get a hit that matched a latent print from a bomb or a weapon, say, a message would pop up.  It could say anything that was entered, such as “DETAIN.  Suspected bombmaker,” or, facetiously, “This is Wali Karzai.  Let him go.”

If a man says he does not want to go into the system, that’s fine.  But in return for entering into the system they will be issued an ID card.

Staff Sergeant Jason Hughes sees great value in the HIIDE system and he was also very helpful in writing this dispatch.  It was easy to respect SSG Hughes.  After all, he had been “burned” in a recent Army Times article by the esteemed author Sean Naylor.  SSG Hughes said that Mr. Naylor was accurate and responsible in his portrayal but nevertheless fallout had cost SSG Hughes his job as squad leader.  Many people might have been angry with “the press” after something like that.  Maybe it was all the combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, or maybe Jason Hughes is just not your average man (that much is clear), but he wasn’t afraid of the pen.  There are generals and colonels and command sergeant majors who are afraid of the pen, maybe after having been burned a time or two, but that’s part of the war.  When you get into the fight, you are going to get cut.  Bottom line: keep rolling.  Staff Sergeant Jason Hughes gets it.  He got bucked off and busted up and jumped right back on.

Jason’s first tour in Iraq was with 506th Regimental Combat Team, 101st ABN (Air Assualt), and he was in Baghdad stationed at FOB Rustimiyah as an Assistant Team Leader on a Recon Team from November 2005 to November 2006.  That was all he needed to say and I knew he had seen a lot of combat.  Bad place, bad time.  He came back for more, and now in Afghanistan seems to have the COIN manual memorized and is always ready to talk counterinsurgency, for which he seems to have an intuitive grasp.  After 8 years in the Army, Mr. Naylor’s story came out SSG Hughes was “tactically reassigned” as the NCOIC (noncommissioned officer in charge) of Charlie Company’s Intelligence Support Team, and that’s how he ended up with a HIIDE system in his hands.   SSG Hughes seems dead set on entering every Afghan possible.  That might not help out this rotation much, but the culmulative effect of building the database can generate enormous benefit.

Unfortunately, this is another fragmented dispatch with no clear trajectory other than to mention HIIDE and Charlie company.  Research got cut short after General McChrystal’s gang suddenly broke a written agreement and ended this embed.

My war gone by.

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