DHS developed HART to replace IDENT; planning documents project about 260 million identities. HART includes fingerprints, face images and iris scans; voice, DNA and physical markers are planned. Public answers on retention, access and oversight remain unclear.
NIST evaluated hundreds of facial-recognition algorithms and found that, in one-to-one verification, false-positive rates for Asian and African American faces often ran 10 to 100 times higher than for Caucasian faces. Rates varied by algorithm and image quality; the article cautions this is not a universal verdict and says one-to-many searches can have different error patterns. A 2024 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report noted heightened consequences of erroneous matches in border and immigration settings.
Northrop Grumman won about $95 million to build HART's first two increments; the system was designed to run on Amazon Web Services' GovCloud. An embedded social-media post alleges HART was wired to live CCTV, data brokers and location history without a warrant; the article does not substantiate those claims and elsewhere says agency access and legal authority remain unanswered.
