The United States Secret Service (USSS) uses AI in its day-to-day activities safeguarding the nation's financial infrastructure and payment systems to preserve the integrity of the economy, and protecting national leaders, visiting heads of state and government, designated sites, and National Special Security Events.
Below is an overview of each AI use case within USSS, as part of the Simplified DHS AI Use Case Inventory. More details about these use cases are available in the Full DHS AI Use Case Inventory on the DHS AI Use Case Inventory publication library.
AI use cases are listed below by deployment status.
Pre-Deployment
No pre-deployment use cases in the Full DHS AI Use Case Inventory.
Deployment
Use Case Name: Criminal Investigations
Use Case ID: DHS-415
Use Case Summary: The investigative mission of the USSS is to detect and arrest those that engage in crimes that undermine the integrity of U.S. financial and payment systems. During criminal investigations, USSS Office of Investigations (INV) personnel may require the identification of potential victims of crimes (e.g., identity theft) or of individuals suspected of crimes. USSS INV personnel may submit available photographs or video stills of these unknown persons as probe images (facial images or templates searched against the gallery of a Facial Recognition Service [FRS]) to other government agencies for comparison against their image galleries.
Additionally, USSS INV personnel may request another government agency to conduct a one-to-one comparison of two photographs or video stills for investigative use.
INV will utilize the DHS Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM) repository to query images for investigation purposes.
USSS INV personnel will query image galleries of known persons and may provide lists of potential matches. USSS INV personnel may use the potential matches to produce investigative leads that will assist in further identifying victims or suspects.
Use Case Topic Area: Law & Justice
Deployment Status: Deployed (Operation and Maintenance)
Safety- and/or rights-impacting? Yes. Rights-impacting
Key Identified Risks & Mitigations: The product was developed by the NEC Corporation using AI and Deep Machine Learning to train the algorithm. However, the current NEC product that is used by OBIM in the production environment does not use AI to continue to train the NEC algorithm on production data. The fact that OBIM/NEC do not use AI on production data to continue to train the algorithm significantly limits the risks associated with the use of AI and ML on the face candidate list process.
Read more about safety and/or rights-impacting AI and compliance with required minimum risk management practices.
Face Recognition/Face Capture (FR/FC)? Yes. All Face Recognition and Face Capture (FR/FC) technology is tested both prior to operational use and at least every three years during operational use. DHS Science and Technology (S&T) oversees testing and evaluation based on International Organization for Standardization/ International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) standards and technical guidance issued by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). DHS S&T applies laboratory, scenario, and operational testing to cost-effectively characterize technology performance and, when feasible, disaggregate performance by user demographics such as gender, age, and skin tone.
Inactive
No inactive use cases in the Full DHS AI Use Case Inventory.