The UK’s Guardian has an interesting, and frightening (if you care about things little things like privacy rights), article on the move toward mandatory fingerprinting across the pond. Here’s a clip:
Ministers are to press ahead with the mandatory fingerprinting of new passport applicants using royal prerogative powers to sidestep the loss of their identity card legislation last week.
The police are expected to be given the authority to carry out checks against this newly created national fingerprint database.
The home secretary Charles Clarke has authorised the passport service to acquire 70 new passport service offices across the country so that all adult applicants for new documents can be interviewed in person from next year. The service currently has seven offices.
The Home Office admits that the new network could also be used in future as identity card enrolment centres and the introduction of mandatory fingerprinting of passport applicants will form an important “building block” for the future ID card scheme.
If I’m reading that correctly, they weren’t able to pass a law requiring a national ID with biometric data, so they did the next best thing and just went about building the infrastructure anyway, claiming that it’s to support passport applicants, who now have to provide their fingerprints… I just thought that I’d mention it now, so you wouldn’t be surprised when the same exact thing happens here.
One wonders, even with the terrorism and all the rest of it, just which of our founding fathers, if they were here today, would submit to being fingerprinted. Maybe I’m giving them too much credti, but I imagine that some noses would be broken.
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California already requires (I believe) a thumbprint to get a driver license. I never got one when I lived there as I didn’t have a car and my Michigan license was still valid. I remember a bouncer at one of the goth bars congratulating me on avoiding having my fingerprints taken. I didn’t tell him that I was just too lazy to take the damn test.