Fingerprints on ID Cards

Fingerprints on ID Cards.

«The home secretary, Charles Clarke, is to press today's emergency European counter-terrorism summit to adopt a plan to compulsorily fingerprint all EU citizens who already carry identity cards.

The scheme is a crucial part of a 10-point anti-terrorism package that includes the retention of email and phone records for up to three years which Mr Clarke will propose when he chairs the emergency summit called in the wake of the London bombings.

The outline of the plan for all ID cards in Europe to carry an electronic fingerprint was submitted to a high-level strategic committee on immigration, frontiers and asylum on Tuesday by British officials acting in their capacity as the presidency of the EU.

"Identity cards are valid travel documents. We cannot afford to have them be a weak link in international travel," a Home Office spokesman said, confirming the plan.

"A really significant amount of travel within Europe is done not on a passport but on an identity card which is just a piece of cardboard with a photograph attached. It is a weak link. We need to have a common standard."

The spokesman stressed, however, that the measure would not mean the EU was compelling those countries which do not have ID cards to adopt them.

Britain is to start introducing "biometric" passports from next year; all applicants will have to go to one of 70 new centres to be fingerprinted and have their face "scanned". In December the EU decided that all passport holders, visitors and foreign resident nationals should be fingerprinted.»

Wonderful. He’s already agreed that ID cards wouldn’t have stopped the bombings. Travel documents wouldn’t have stopped them as we now know the bombers were home grown. What the hell is this for? Just the general desire to have a huge database of everyone?

This is one of two things.

1) A politician cannot be seen to be doing nothing. No one of them actually has the courage to say that there are problems that cannot be solved by politicians.

2) It’s the Home Office reflex approach to anything. We need to have a database of the helots so we can control them.

Update: Marlene Dietrich (?) sends in this link to Statewatch. They’re using the European Union like companies use consultants, to push through something they cannot get support for any other way. The international rules agreed to do NOT require biometrics or fingerprints, only a digital photo. But if the EU says all ID cards must have those then voila, our domestic ones must as well.
As ever, Chirs Lightfoot has the info.
BTW, we might note that fingerprints are not unique. Amongst 450 million people we will all have several if not many matches. This is a function of the way in which fingerprints are compared. And yes, it was many years ago but I do have some knowledge of the systems used. I bought the source code of the KGB’s system for use by those planning the FBI’s.

Fonte:
http://timworstall.typepad.com/timworstall/2005/07/fingerprints_on.html