A US-based software company that provides biometric systems to US immigration authorities for border monitoring and surveillance.
Aware, Inc., headquartered in Bedford, Mass., provides software for the collection, management, processing, and matching of biometric images and data for identification and authentication. It conducts business in over 20 countries and holds contracts with more than 150 law enforcement agencies.
U.S. immigration authority Customs and Border Protection (CBP) uses Aware’s CaptureSuite software pack to identify and track individuals. CaptureSuite is a set of three fingerprint software development kits that enable rapid, high-quality fingerprint capture and quality insurance. Since 2017, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agencies—specifically CBP—have licensed CaptureSuite from Aware. Under a contract worth a potential $2.1 million, Aware will provide CBP with CaptureSuite software until at least November 2024. In 2020, the company reported that CaptureSuite would be used by CBP to scan individuals’ fingerprints when crossing U.S. borders.
In 2022, Aware was awarded a subcontract as part of a larger General Dynamics contract for providing maintenance to one of DHS’s data centers and support for the Automated Real-time Identity Exchange System (ARIES). ARIES was created to handle international fingerprint sharing between DHS, the Department of State, and the Department of Justice with “foreign partners.” ARIES supports other biometrics-based programs such as the International Biometric Information Sharing Program (IBIS), which is used to exchange fingerprint data between the U.S. and “foreign partners” by providing “automatic comparison of the fingerprints collected by DHS or a foreign partner on border crossers, suspected criminals, asylum seekers, irregular migrants, refugees, and other individuals.”
Aware also sells WSQ1000, one of the CaptureSuite software development kits, to the Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI). Aware developed WSQ1000 in partnership with the FBI in the 1990s. The system uses algorithms to shrink the file size of digital fingerprint scans, enabling the FBI to maintain a large digital fingerprint database and to quickly send fingerprint scans to local law enforcement agencies. According to Aware’s website, “all finger and palm images submitted to the FBI are managed by Aware WSQ1000.”These images are housed in the FBI’s massive Next Generation Identification system (NGI), a biometric database that contains tens of millions of fingerprint records. This database replaced the FBI’s previous biometric database, the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS).
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can access data from both HART and NGI to identify undocumented immigrants who are arrested and fingerprinted by local law enforcement. ICE has also used Aware’s software directly, having purchased software licenses between 2018 and 2019 for around $29,000.