Governance Failure: What the DHS Biometric Proposal Reveals About the “Collect Everything” Instinct

By Dr. SK, CIPT, PMP

The instinct to acquire data is universal. From an engineering or analytical standpoint, the DHS expansion—capturing facial scans, DNA, voice prints, and fingerprints of immigrants and children—is the ultimate source: unlimited samples, zero resistance.

From a privacy governance perspective, it is a catastrophic demonstration of how organizations default to Level 1 Fire Drill thinking, treating data as an asset to be collected, rather than a liability to be governed.

The Collector’s Default

The DHS plan reads like the natural endpoint of the "collect everything just in case" mantra. If you can collect it (biometrics, DNA), the institutional impulse is to retain it permanently.

But Privacy by Design begins with a single, restrictive question: Why are you collecting it?

"Because we can" has never been a lawful basis.

This impulse highlights the fatal translation gap: Legal speaks in Lawful Basis and Purpose Limitation. Engineering speaks in Data Fields and Storage Latency. The DHS proposal failed to translate the legal principles into a technical requirement for scoping the collection. The system was designed by the collectors, for the collectors.

The Missing Governance Checkpoint

Somewhere between the line item for $57 million in DNA kits and the promise of "lifecycle management," a privacy technologist should have raised a hand and pushed the program into Level 2—Repeatable Process mode.

A privacy-literate governance lead would have immediately forced the translation of high-level policy into concrete system requirements:

1. Purpose: What is the single, auditable purpose for each identifier (e.g., fingerprints vs. voice prints)?
2. Proportionality: Why is permanent, lifelong retention necessary when the stated purpose (e.g., verifying identity at intake) is transient?
3. Risk: Why was a formal DPIA (Data Protection Impact Assessment) not conducted to manage the specific, permanent risk of biometrics and minors’ data?

This is not bureaucracy. It is the shared vocabulary that prevents a single-purpose project from becoming a lifelong data landfill.

Governance by Absence

The proposal's admission that the DHS does not know the full cost of the expansion is a polite way of saying it does not know the full risk appetite. In governance terms, there is no defined accountability matrix, no Key Risk Indicators (KRIs), and no intent to subject the system to continuous audit.

The result is Governance by Absence—the quiet default mode of collect now, justify later.

In a mature privacy program, this is precisely the moment the Privacy Intake Form (PAS-01A)* is deployed. The project manager would not have been allowed to proceed past Question 3: Data Elements until Legal and Governance co-signed on the specific Lawful Basis and Retention Rule for DNA.

The True Cost of Data Sprawl

Children's biometrics and DNA are not just "personal data." They are permanent, unchangeable identifiers. Under any robust risk model, this is the definition of high-risk processing, demanding strict minimization and layered safeguards (aligned with ISO 27001:2022 A.5.33 Privacy by Design).

Collecting more doesn't equal better oversight. It equals more attack surface, more liability, and more ethical debt that will be paid over the lifespan of the data subjects—literally.

Closing Reflection

The DHS goal of preventing trafficking and verifying identities is legitimate. The failure is not in the intent, but in the architecture.

A competent privacy engineer could have saved the agency millions and a great deal of public backlash by insisting on scope, purpose, and proportionality at the design stage. The difference between a responsible program and this current catastrophe is simply the deployment of a few, disciplined Level 2 processes.

Governance isn't anti-security; it's what makes security credible.

Note: PAS-01A originated as a fictional control example. A working template version now lives in the Controls & Templates section of Privacy Atelier for reference.

© Privacy Atelier | CC BY-NC 4.0 | Examples are composites.