Merry Christmas, American public! Reuters is reporting that FBI is moving ahead with its plan to spend a billion US taxpayer dollars on what it calls the Next Generation Identification system, which it aims to make the largest biometrics cache in the world. Because really, what could possibly go wrong in letting the government collect records of everyone's faces, fingerprints, and palm patterns (what, no retinal scans?) and even collude with private employers to automatically collect and add all the biometric data amassed during potential employees' criminal background checks? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Obviously.P.S. -The only other document on NGI we were able to immediately turn up appears to come from 2006, and it doesn't like the same that Reuters is referring to . [Warning: PDF link]