Thales

Thales, based in Paris and partially owned (25%) by the French government, is a military and information technology (IT) company that operates in the aerospace, space, military, security, and transportation industries. 

Thales primarily contracts with government customers, namely military agencies in France, Australia, the U.K., and the rest of Europe. Thales has been a prime contractor of the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) since 2000, for services such as telecommunications equipment, aircraft manufacturing, navigational equipment, and data-related activities. As of July 2024, it has been awarded over $3 billion by the DOD. In 2019, the company acquired Gemalto, which has several contracts with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Through its subsidiary Gemalto, Thales played a key role in developing the fingerprint matching component of DHS’s biometric database, known as IDENT. The database, designed and operated by General Dynamics, contained biometric profiles of at least 268 million people and served as the key technology behind DHS’s Secure Communities program, enabling automated fingerprint sharing between local law enforcement and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Secure Communities was launched in March 2008 and triggered a sharp increase in deportations during the first years of the Obama administration. By the time of its suspension in November 2014, the program was already responsible for an estimated 450,000 deportations. It was reactivated by the Trump administration in 2017.

IDENT was migrated and upgraded into ICE’s novel Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) system through a contract awarded to Peraton, a company owned by private equity firm Veritas Capital. HART will collect and analyze facial images, DNA profiles, iris scans, digital fingerprints, and voice prints, in combination with other biographic information, in order to construct unique profiles of hundreds of millions of people. HART sources this information from and shares it with other federal agencies, local law enforcement, and some foreign governments.

In September 2023, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published a report explaining that HART was behind schedule and stating that DHS had failed to address “privacy weaknesses,” including risks associated with storing unique identifiable data such as DNA, fingerprints, facial patterns, full name, and country of origin. The database is hosted on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, and Thales has stated that it expects the database to “encompass biometrics for 500 million people.” Prior to Peraton, Northrop Grumman was the contractor in charge of HART.

In 2023, Gemalto was awarded a subcontract to support Northrop Grumman’s development of HART, when it was still the main contractor, in order to “take critical biometric identity technology to the next level” by matching information on undocumented residents, immigrants, and even citizens with biometric and other biographic information. Gemalto provides HART with its fingerprint matching technology and supplies DHS with ePassports, which may include electronic devices embedded in physical passports, digital IDs on mobile devices, and documents paired with biometric identification such as facial recognition.Gemalto similarly designed fingerprint identification technology for the European Union’s Entry/Exit system, which stores biometric information belonging to asylum seekers and detained immigrants.

In April 2018, Gemalto was awarded a contract by the U.S. Department of State for “3M Cogent’s Automated Biometric Identification System (CABIS).” CABIS is a biometric matching tool that speeds up searches in biometric databases. In addition, CABIS is capable of “processing ten prints, palm prints, finger latents, palm latents, faces, and irises,” and has been used in 80 countries worldwide. Gemalto acquired 3M's Identity Management Business, which included 3M Cogent, in 2017.