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The Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters in Washington. The FBI's Next Generation Identification (NGI) system is now fully operational, after more than three years of development.

(Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP)

The FBI announced Monday that after three years the agency's facial recognition database is now fully operational.

Programmers have installed the Next Generation Identification system (NGI) in 18,000 bureaus across the country and compiled more than 8 million mug shots, The Daily Mail reports.

The FBI began piloting the program in February 2011 with the same company, MorphoTrust, that produced a State Department facial recognition database containing some 244 million images.

The program adds to the FBI's fingerprint database, which contains over 100 million records. In June, FBI Director James Comey told lawmakers, "We're piloting the use of mug shots, along with our fingerprint database, to see if we can find bad guys by matching pictures with mug shots," The Daily Mail reports.

The NGI system will now include automated fingerprint search capabilities, mobile fingerprint identification and electronic image storage, a press release from the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division said.

The new system can also pick out suspects from a crowd and will feature a notification system, called Rap Back, that will give investigators live updates of any given criminal's movements, The Daily Mail reports.

By 2015, detectives are expected to able to use the system's Interstate Photo System (IPS) to trace at least 52 million people, including innocent citizens, which has some privacy groups crying foul.

The groups say it's another step taken in the direction of becoming a surveillance state, especially since the system will mix criminal mug shots with non-criminal faces from employment records and background check databases, The Verge reports.

Edward Snowden said in June that the National Security Agency pulls in millions of images to aid its own facial recognition program, Al Jazeera America reports.

FBI director Comey admitted to lawmakers that he didn't know where pictures in the database were coming from: "I think there is some circumstances in which when states send us records, they'll send us pictures of people who are getting special driving licenses to transport children or explosive materials or something--but as I understand it, those are not part of the searchable Next Generation Identification database."

The facial recognition system "will provide the nation's law enforcement community with an investigative tool that provides an image-searching capability of photographs associated with criminal identities," the FBI press release said.

But civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues that the system is a threat to privacy of Americans with no criminal record. In April, EFF filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain information on NGI. The group said the documents they obtained showed up to 4.3 million pictures taken for non-criminal purposes will be added to the database.

Additionally, mug shots will be combined with non-criminal facial images taken from employment records and background check databases, The Verge reports. So someone with no criminal history could be suspected of a crime if his or her face happens to be in the database, the EFF said.

Despite the privacy concerns, some industry professional label the IPS as ineffective because of its low rate of success. For a given face, NGI returns a list of 50 candidates, and only gives an 85 percent chance that the suspect will be on the list, The Verge reports.

The FBI said the new system will eventually replace the national fingerprint database, The Daily Mail reports, and is the first of a string of phases that will modernize the country's detective work.