US House intelligence report urges CBP to use land border biometrics to ‘build profiles’

Twenty-five years after the 9/11 Commission called for a biometric system capable of tracking foreign nationals entering and leaving the U.S., the House Intelligence Committee says the government still has not finished the job and is urging Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to expand biometric collection at land borders so it can track travelers and “build profiles.”

The recommendation is contained in a new House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence review of the intelligence reforms adopted after the September 11 attacks. The committee concludes that a comprehensive biometric entry-exit system remains one of the major unfinished pieces of the post-9/11 security architecture.

The report recommends that foreign nationals traveling to and from the U.S. pass through controls at both admission and departure, similar to systems used in Europe’s Schengen Area, allowing the government to determine “who is in the country, for how long, why, and when they leave.”

It goes further at the land borders.

“As much as practically possible,” the committee says, U.S. borders should be configured so foreign nationals leaving by land must pass through ports of entry where CBP can collect their biometrics and “build profiles.”

That language puts a sharper edge on a recommendation that otherwise resembles a goal Congress and successive administrations have pursued for decades.

It also comes as the committee simultaneously calls for more interoperable intelligence systems, greater use of commercially available information and AI, while warning that the U.S. must not reproduce the surveillance architecture of authoritarian governments.

The 9/11 Commission originally recommended that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) complete a biometric entry-exit system and connect biometric passports with government data systems so travelers could not defeat screening simply by discarding an old passport and slightly changing their name.

The House report revisits the Commission’s finding that weaknesses in immigration identity verification prevented authorities from determining whether some of the hijackers were “who or what they claim to be.”

Congress subsequently required increasingly integrated arrival and departure databases, biometric travel documents and greater interoperability among immigration, intelligence and law enforcement systems. But the resulting architecture remains uneven.

A graphic in the report shows biometric air entry as complete and air exit as nearly complete.

Sea entry is complete but sea exit remains incomplete. Pedestrian land entry is complete, while biometric collection from people entering in vehicles remains unfinished. Biometric land exit at both the northern and southern borders remains incomplete.

The committee says that, despite years of work, the U.S. “has not fully implemented a biometric exit screening system at any point of entry category.”

Janice Kephart, a 9/11 Commissioner and the panel’s border counsel who, alongside her team, drafted the recommendation for a biometric entry-exit screening system, said in a LinkedIn post “that this came from the intelligence committee matters. Entry-exit gets treated as a DHS logistics problem — cameras, kiosks, lanes.”

“At its base it is an operational intelligence function, and the Committee said as much: screening and vetting is a highly intelligence-dependent enterprise,” Kephart said. “Biometrics answer who a person is. Intelligence answers whether that person matters. The failure in 2001 was not an absence of information – it was that identity and intelligence were never anchored to each other.”

Continuing, Kephart – who also led the former Biometrics Interagency Working Group out of DHS’s Office of Biometric Identity Management, said, “The piece the review leaves out is the operative half of the 2004 recommendation. The Commission asked for a single system combining biometric entry-exit data with visitor and immigrant files and with intelligence and law enforcement information. Collecting the biometric is the easy half. Connecting it is the mandate.”

Kephart said the government’s biometric databases collectively “hold well over half a billion records on protocols that do not natively speak to each other. [The] National Counterterrorism Center still anchors watchlist adjudication to names and dates of birth – the data the Commission warned a terrorist defeats by discarding a passport and adjusting a spelling.”

That distinction is important because the government has made considerably more progress identifying people when they enter the country than confirming when they leave.

Air travel provides carriers, airports and CBP with a relatively controlled environment in which passenger identities and facial images can be matched. Vehicle crossings and land exits present a substantially more difficult infrastructure and operational problem.

CBP has continued experimenting with ways around those constraints.

The report points to the agency’s Voluntary Self-Reported Exit pilot, announced in March 2025, under which certain noncitizens can use a CBP application to photograph themselves after leaving the country.

The app uses geolocation to confirm the person is outside the U.S. and software to determine whether the submitted image is a live photograph rather than a spoof. It also notes that DHS amended its regulations in October 2025 to permit collection of photographs from all noncitizens arriving in and departing from the U.S.

The committee argues that technological advances now make completion of the system substantially more feasible than it was when the 9/11 Commission issued its recommendations in 2004.

The report says technological progress, “especially with the introduction of new technologies such as artificial intelligence,” offers an opportunity to close the remaining biometric exit gap.

It describes screening and vetting as an intelligence-dependent function in which biometric or biographic identity information is useful only if it can be connected with intelligence identifying people who warrant further scrutiny.

Immediately after calling for completion of biometric entry-exit, the committee recommends that the Intelligence Community prioritize interoperable technology platforms incorporating AI from “trusted vendors” that can share intelligence, data and threat indicators across agencies in real time.

Those systems, it says, should eliminate unnecessary barriers to information sharing while maintaining security controls.

The report does not propose putting all biometric, immigration and intelligence data into a single database, nor does it describe a specific AI system that would construct the profiles contemplated at land borders.

But taken together, its recommendations point toward a much more integrated screening environment than the biometric passport system contemplated a quarter century ago, one in which biometric identity can be combined with other government and intelligence data and evaluated across increasingly interoperable platforms.

The committee acknowledges the civil liberties implications of that approach. Before laying out its recommendations, the committee said the U.S. “must not replicate the surveillance architectures employed by totalitarian and authoritarian regimes” and warns against judging intelligence effectiveness by the ability to imitate coercive foreign systems.

Any effort to lower barriers between intelligence collection and law enforcement, it says, must therefore include rigorous oversight and safeguards for Americans’ privacy, rights and civil liberties.

That tension runs through the report. The committee wants fewer information silos, more automated analysis, broader access to commercial data and tighter federal, state and local intelligence integration, while simultaneously warning about the surveillance consequences of building precisely that kind of architecture.

The report also describes emerging identity threats that could make conventional screening increasingly difficult.

In a section on foreign influence operations, lawmakers warn that generative AI can allow adversaries to produce fake voices, fake videos and enormous volumes of synthetic messaging.

The report cites testimony that AI and other synthetic media are likely to increase both the scale and sophistication of influence operations conducted through social networks and other digital platforms.

Although the report does not recommend a specific digital identity, provenance or deepfake-detection system, the concern bears directly on identity assurance.

As synthetic audio, video and online personas become easier to create, systems that rely on digital representations of people increasingly have to determine not merely whether information matches an identity record, but whether the person or evidence being presented is authentic in the first place.

The committee is also pressing intelligence agencies to make far greater use of commercially and publicly available identity information.

Its report says vast quantities of open source and commercially available data remain underused by the Intelligence Community.

At a May hearing cited in the report, counterterrorism expert Bruce Hoffman noted that extremely detailed personal information about people in the public eye can be purchased for almost nothing, including home addresses, phone numbers and Social Security numbers.

The committee recommends professionalizing open source intelligence as a primary intelligence discipline, creating dedicated budget lines and job classifications for it, and more closely integrating commercial technology capable of exploiting open source data with classified intelligence tools.

The result is a vision of post-9/11 identity and intelligence systems that looks markedly different from what the original Commission contemplated.

The unfinished biometric entry-exit system remains at its core. But the committee now sees that system operating in an environment shaped by facial recognition, liveness detection, geolocation, commercially collected identity information, AI-generated impersonation and real-time intelligence platforms capable of moving information across agency boundaries.

Article Topics

biometric exit  |  biometric identification  |  biometrics  |  border security  |  CBP  |  Janice Kephart  |  U.S. Government