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The US military created a vast database of biometric data — one report suggests it had a goal of 25 million entries — as part of its effort to track terrorists in Afghanistan. Now that the US has withdrawn from the country, reports from The Intercept and Reuters suggest the Taliban could potentially use it to target allies left behind.
As The Intercept notes, the collection of biometric data was primarily billed as a military project, but Afghan civilians who worked for US embassies and the broader coalition government were reportedly also included in the database. The biometric information that could be on file for those people varies: the Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (HIIDE) used by the military collects…
