The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Surveillance by Robin Tudge

Author:Robin Tudge [Tudge, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Media Studies, Modern, Social Science, Reference, Political Science, Personal & Practical Guides, Political Freedom, History, General
ISBN: 9781780260273
Google: Zdn0AgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 13236671
Publisher: New Internationalist
Published: 2011-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

Meanwhile parents are often the last to know their children are being fingerprinted, or else are offered a deal they can’t refuse. Morley High School in Leeds decreed that any child opting out of fingerprinting could not have school meals, a likely breach of schools’ legal duty to provide meals for pupils who want them.42 Children have even been tricked into handing over their prints by being told they are going to play a ‘game of spies’ by the people entrusted to protect them.

From a young age, children are conditioned to give up their biometric data to further someone else’s profit-driven whim, and ‘to embrace the idea of Big Brother-style biometric tracking. If ever there was a generation that would not oppose a government system for universal ID, it’s this one,’ the US-based Electronic Privacy Information Center said in 2003. One York headteacher justified the stealthy fingerprinting of thousands of children across the city: ‘All the measures to do with ID cards will possibly invade their privacy even further, but the world has no answer to terrorism without using these things and I would see us as getting them ready for the world in which they will have to live,’ adding that parents had rarely complained.43 It was more likely they didn’t know, as the revelations only emerged via a Freedom of Information Act request.

Both the Irish Information Commissioner’s Office and the Hong Kong Privacy Commissioner have slammed such practices, the former in 2007 deeming it unnecessary and in breach of the Data Protection Act to fingerprint children.44 Fingerprinting may well also breach children’s privacy as defined by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 16 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.45

What such technology can deliver is a false sense of security. In 2006, a Finnish military researcher revealed how fingerprints scanned by Microsoft’s Fingerprint Reader, used for authenticating access to PCs since 2004, could be hacked and used for bogus authentication elsewhere. Microsoft had warned that the system was for convenience and not suitable for protecting sensitive data, but had the system’s customers spent money on little more than a gimmick?46 As ID management expert Andrew Clymer said: ‘No system can guarantee the security of information against future technology. Attempting to protect lifetime relevant information is extremely tricky and potentially costly.’47 Indeed, fingerprints can be recreated using latex or ballistics gel, or even photocopies, and have been proven to fool door scanners.48

A victim of fingerprint forgery cannot get new fingerprints, yet must live in a world where every daily transaction and function can depend on biometrics proving one’s identity. Once those biometrics are compromised by criminals, a lifetime of inconvenience and false allegations can ensue. While commerce and government demand ever more intrusive biometric data in the name of mitigating risk, so the risks of data failure ruining people’s lives increase. As IT security consultant Brian Drury said in 2007: ‘If a child has never touched a fingerprint scanner, there is zero probability of being incorrectly investigated for a crime.

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