DHS/ICE/PIA-010 National Child Victim Identification System (NCVIS)

The National Child Victim Identification System (NCVIS), owned by U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE), Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), is an application that assists federal, state, local, and international law enforcement agencies, INTERPOL, and other supporting organizations, such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) (hereafter, authorized partners) in the investigation and prosecution of child exploitation crimes, specifically those involving images of child sexual exploitation. NCVIS maintains a repository of digital images of child exploitation seized and/or submitted to ICE for comparison by law enforcement agencies. These images may capture the faces or other identifying features of the victims and violators involved in these crimes. HSI is expanding the scope of system information that is shared with authorized partners that maintain their own databases of images related to child exploitation crimes for the purposes of identifying the child victims and supporting law enforcement investigations and prosecutions of these crimes. This expanded sharing is intended to allow law enforcement personnel to use these images during investigations to identify and rescue child victims as well as identify and prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes. HSI is also expanding the range of images shared with law enforcement agencies that have requested a matching report of an image submitted for NCVIS comparison. The Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) for NCVIS was originally published on August 21, 2009. Because HSI is expanding the scope of NCVIS information that is shared with authorized partners, an update to the NCVIS PIA is required.