Biometric Cyberintelligence and the Posse Comitatus Act

This Article addresses the rapid growth of what the military and intelligence community refer to as ¿biometric-enabled intelligence.¿ This newly emerging intelligence tool is reliant upon biometric databases. This Article introduces the term ¿biometric cyberintelligence¿ to more accurately describe the manner in which this new tool is dependent upon cybersurveillance and big data¿s mass-integrative systems. It then argues that the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, designed to limit the deployment of federal military resources in the service of domestic policies, will be difficult to enforce to protect against militarized cyberpolicing and cybersurveillance harms that may generate from the domestic use of military grade cybersurveillance tools. The Posse Comitatus Act and constitutional protections such as the Fourth Amendment¿s privacy jurisprudence, therefore, must be reinforced in the digital age to appropriately protect citizens from militarized cyberpolicing: the blending of military/foreign intelligence tools, and homeland security/domestic law enforcement tools.