One of the most important innovations in the FBI's post-9/11 counterterrorism efforts consists of a portable workstation and a miniaturesatellite dish. Called the Quick Capture Platform (QCP), it electronically scans fingerprints and beams them to a database here.

"What it provides is the capability from anywhere for an agent to send prints to the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) and the Defense Dept.'s Automatic Biometric Identification System (ABIS)," says Roy Bowlen of the FBI, who helped develop the system.

IAFIS and ABIS together make up the largest trove of fingerprint data in the world.

The fingerprints are scanned into a digital format and data are beamed via satellite to an underground data center. There, the computerized systems search the database and shoot back matches, "a lot of times in under 2 min.," says Bowlen.

The time is the same whether the prints are sent from one floor away or, as Bowlen puts it, "from the jungles of Zamboanga [in the Philippines]." In fact, he adds, "I have one [set of prints] from the jungles of Zamboanga."

Ten years ago, the FBI fingerprint system was focused on cataloging criminals in the U.S., but now, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Zamboanga, agents and U.S. soldiers use the QCP to take fingerprints of everyone they detain, sending the prints via satellite to the FBI, to see if they get a hit in FBI or Pentagon databases. If they don't, they create a file, ensuring that if they encounter that person again, they will have a unique record.

Once the remit of government workers who sifted through huge files of fingerprint cards, biometrics are now part of a complex, connected computer system that links the FBI, Pentagon, State Dept., Homeland Security Dept. and even the intelligence community. Thousands of prints are sent daily from U.S. consulates taking visa applications, police officers booking criminals and detainees entering Guantanamo Bay. And they all end up in West Virginia.

At the heart of that industry is the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) complex, which comprises seven buildings on nearly 1,000 acres of reclaimed strip-mining land outside Clarksburg.

In the 1990s, the FBI was receiving ink-rolled fingerprints on paper cards that were filed in rows of cabinets. Fingerprint examiners would pore over the papers for matches. The process, which often took weeks or months, made the FBI almost irrelevant for law enforcement agencies: By the time a match was made, a criminal using a fake name might be back on the street.

The FBI had to modernize, and Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), had a solution: If the fingerprinting division left the Hoover building in Washington and moved to West Virginia, he would use his position as head of the Senate Appropriations Committee to secure funding for a state-of-the-art facility. The deal went through and the biometrics section moved to West Virginia.