West Virginia Buys Lockheed Martin Fingerprint System

By William Welsh, Staff Writer


JUNE 14 - Lockheed Martin Information Systems won a $2.9 million contract to provide an automated identification system for fingerprints to the West Virginia State Police modeled on the same technology it provided to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for its national fingerprint identification system, the company announced.


The West Virginia State Police will use Lockheed Martin's Automated Fingerprint Identification System for everything from routine background checks to major crime scene investigations. The technology is being provided to the West Virginia State Police through a cooperative agreement with the FBI.


The Orlando-based division of Lockheed Martin Corp. of Bethesda, Md., will perform work in Orlando and West Virginia.


"The FBI's AFIS was designed to be scalable," said John Hallal, president of Lockheed Martin Information Systems. "This system can be expanded to handle an increasing national workload, or sized to meet the needs of an individual state, city or region."


The implementation of AFIS for the FBI in July 1999 gave it the capability to match a fingerprint characteristic with the ridge patterns of more than 400 million other fingerprints. As a result, the identification process was streamlined from months to hours.


AFIS is a commercial spin-off of technology originally developed by Lockheed Martin for target identification in defense applications.