It has become difficult to maintain hundreds of hard copies of fingerprints and keep track of the many different regions of the world. If a crime has occurred in an area and the person has fled, it may be difficult for police to determine the suspect from fingerprints alone. It was not until the early 1960s that the FBI and many other major police forces around the world began producing the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, also known as AFIS (Moses 124-125). They needed a fast, easy-to-use system that could hold thousands of pieces of fingerprint information that could be easily shared across the United States. An FBI special agent, Carl Voelker, went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to design the AFIS they were hoping for. After the NIST team studied how the FBI currently searches for fingerprints manually, they decided the easiest way would be to transfer the information to an electronic database. They then created a scanner that could capture fingerprints on a card or on a card taken from a crime scene. The image would then be compared to the fingerprints stored in the online database. When it searches for a fingerprint match, it also records the fingerprint details and pattern. The first prototype was created in 1972 by Cornell Aeronautical Labs Inc., with success. By 1986,