Privacy International is distributing an old-style “wanted poster” offering a £1000 (C$2000) reward for the fingerprints of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. According to the organization’s .PDF poster, the project — apparently legal — is a response to the UK’s calls for:
“the collection of all ten fingerprints of all citizens and residents and [for] placing them into a single centralised database for wide access by police, and other government agencies. The Government is clear that it wants to treat all citizens as though they are criminals, having promised the police that they can trawl through the fingerprint database for forensic purposes.”
Britain has been cozying up to the idea of fingerprinting absolutely everyone to help prevent future attacks like the infamous July 7, 2005 bombing. One example of the new fingerprint-happy policy is Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5, which in March became the world’s first to secure the fingerprints of all passengers boarding any plane to anywhere. Police officers reserve the right to fingerprint any driver they pull over on the spot. In 2010, the government will begin fingerprinting children as young as 11 who apply for passports, and last year it gave elementary schools the go-ahead to fingerprint students as young as five.
Why is this a big deal? Partly because last November the UK admitted to losing discs containing the personal data of 25 million people, or about 41 per cent of the country’s entire population. Apparently their birth dates, bank account information, home addresses, national insurance numbers and other info were lost in the mail. And partly because the British government has a nasty habit of misplacing laptops containing people’s confidential personal information. As well, unlike a credit card number, your fingerprint can’t ever be changed — if it falls into the wrong hands, you may have a miserable time getting anything from a job to a mortgage to a credit card for the rest of your life.
Via Boing Boing.
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