20 July 2019

FBI fingerprint files in 1944


And to think all of this information would probably fit on a modern thumb drive.  Via.

More information about this building at Rare Historical Photos.

6 comments:

  1. Where is the building? When was it built, and was it built for this purpose? Does it still stand?

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    Replies
    1. Here, let me Google that for you...

      https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/fbi-fingerprint-files-facility-1944/

      Good website. I've added it to the body of the post.

      :-)

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    2. The "rare historical photos" on that site are often mislabeled. I would always do a deep Google Image Search on anything you find there.

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  2. My glass top dining table collects fingerprints at the same rate.

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  3. So a modern thumb drive is 1 Terabyte (1e12 b=Bytes) and I read on the internet that a typical thumb print is 10KB (https://www.govtech.com/security/Biometrics-Needed-.html), which is 1e4 Bytes.
    So that is 1e8 thumb prints, or 100 million. Your follow-on link says there are 10 million finger prints in the FBIs database (perhaps all in that photo), so in fact a modern thumb drive could store 10s times as many finger prints as in the photo, and a smart phone could probably find a matching fingerprint as quickly as Google can search the Internet.

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  4. These would all fit on a MicroSD card which is smaller than my pinkie fingernail. Technology is amazing. Thumb drive would be overkill...

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