Here at Ars, we often speak of facial-recognition technology as some Orwellian surveillance method that will one day be deployed by governments or other actors to chronicle our every move—perhaps for nefarious purposes. We reported Wednesday that the Department of Homeland Security is pushing a plan that would require all Americans to submit to a facial-recognition scan when flying out of the country. Whether that's good or bad is open for debate. To add to that, the nation's spy agencies have asked the public to help make biometrics more accurate.

While we're not at an Orwellian point in time yet with biometrics, facial-recognition technology is being used for good, no matter how scary the technology sounds. Consider that Nevada authorities have announced that biometrics was behind the arrest of a violent criminal who escaped from prison 25 years ago. It's another in a string of arrests in which biometrics essentially paved the way for a bad guy's capture.

What led to the recent arrest of 64-year-old career criminal Robert Frederick Nelson of North Las Vegas, who committed a number of felonies after escaping from a Minnesota prison in 1992? He applied for a Nevada ID card, and the Silver State's facial recognition tech doomed him.

"Nelson applied for a renewal of his Nevada identification card on June 5, 2017. Investigators withheld the card after the DMV's facial-recognition system showed the same person had previously held a Nevada driver's license in the name of Craig James Pautler," Nevada DMV officials said.

A background check showed numerous felonies under both names, the authorities said.

Biometrics technology is becoming an everyday facet of society for both the private and public sectors. Facebook is among the best-known private-sector players in the field when it comes to tagging people in photos. In a law-enforcement context, about half of all US adults have their images in a crime-fighting, biometrics database—that's about 117 million adults.

In the latest Nevada case, according to the Nevada DMV:

While piecing together Nelson's and Pautler's identities, DMV investigators discovered Nelson was arrested by the Secret Service in the late 1980s on multiple counterfeiting charges. He escaped from the Federal Medical Center prison in Rochester, Minnesota in 1992 and quickly assumed the identity of Craig Pautler, obtaining a Nevada commercial driver license. Under his new identity, Pautler began a violent criminal history including multiple robberies with a deadly weapon, possession of stolen property, burglaries and another escape from a Nevada holding facility with the use of a weapon. At some point during the mid-2000s, Nelson assumed his original identity. He obtained a Nevada ID card under his real name in 2013.

Nevada's DMV moved to facial-recognition technology in 2008.

Listing image by Alfred Pasieka/Science Photo Library