http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25550354

So the use of biometrics has been expanded to the ME, GOOD. The interesting part is how the data is being shared across the board with US agencies as well as international groups suck as Interpol.

Catching guilty parties before they can strike again, guilty of previous crimes mind you not a preemptive guilty ;p, is nothing but goodness.

However the fact that some of these jokers are apparently guilty of crimes in Canada and the US, as an example, and are now back in theater doing who knows what is terrifying.

We really need stronger boarder measures with the prevention of these type of yahoo's getting inside our boarders being our highest priority.

"We really need stronger boarder measures with the prevention of these type of yahoo's getting inside our boarders being our highest priority."

Screw biometrics - have we come up with any antiparasitic drugs for that yet? It must terribly be uncomfortable for our resident aliens having yahoos inside them... ;)

Just poking fun at you, Fandros, but one does have to wonder a bit when the reports of successful identifications come from such unbiased sources as these:

Among his many charges were misdemeanors for theft and public drunkenness in Chicago and Utah, a criminal record that ran from 1993 to 2001, said Herb Richardson, who serves as operations manager for the military's Automated Biometric Identification System under a contract with Ideal Innovations of Arlington.

Mr. Richardson couldn't *possibly* have any vested interest in *selling* said snake oil and parasite identification system, could he? And if this is the best he can come up with re 'success' stories, how much is Ideal Innovations raking in under the charge to 'protect' us from the likes of public drunkenness and parking tickets?

As they analyzed the results, they were surprised to learn that one out of every 100 detainees was already in the FBI's database for arrests. Many arrests were for drunken driving, passing bad checks and traffic violations, FBI officials said.

Clearly these folks present a clear and present danger to the country, and we should expand this program to test every single resident of Afghanistan, Iraq, and anyone else we don't like or who looks like they could conceivably be up to something suspicious in the future. After all, it's all about keeping us safe, and errors are *never* made off those partial prints on IEDs, etc...

"The bottom line is we're locking people up," said Thomas E. Bush III, FBI assistant director of the Criminal Justice Information Services division. "Stopping people coming into this country. Identifying IED-makers in a way never done before. That's the beauty of this whole data-sharing effort. We're pushing our borders back."

Thank god that, thanks to this program, we're being protected from bad check writers halfway across the globe. If only we could protect ourselves from them here! Hey wait... maybe we *could*... ;) (and as an aside, given the current economy, I have little doubt that 'relief' legislation we'll be seeing in the near term is going to be more focused on protecting institutions *from* debtors than addressing the concerns of the drowning-in-debt, newly jobless, newly foreclosed on, etc).

If you actually buy the argument that mass fingerprinting of random folks on the other side of the world is going to prevent another 9/11 type attack (or IED alongside of the road in Iraq, for that matter), I have a Tortilla Curtain (tm) to sell you...

Sincerely,
Nydia

On a more serious note, I suppose I find it a bit troubling that we applaud such efforts when we can abstract away what is being trampled upon civil rights wise when it involves a group in another country, and not consider the implications of where that mindset leads us (such as academicians being placed on 'do not fly' lists, or the locking up of 'suspected' terrorists for years on such 'evidence' as the above-mentioned public drunkenness convictions, etc). Some of the quotes in the article I find truly frightening, but not for the same reasons Fandros does.

Shheeshhhh oh verbose one I wasn't saying my posted reasons were the sole reasons I found the report frighting ;P

Some of us do throw up a quick synopse without sounding as if they enjoy writing a college level theme paper each time they post ;P

While some of the folks discovered via this method were indeed only DUI offenders ( btw I did time and paid a huge fine, guess these guys are better eh), bad check writers (guess the store owners that were out those monies were only mildly put out ) and such there were others that were charged with weapons violations. That, my dear, is of serious note.

My biggest problem, and no it's not akin to you seeing a snake oil salesmen behind each and every project lately , is the apparent ease these folks skip back and forth.

It's not a good sign, and as I've been a constant voice on our lack of boarder (thanks for the spelling, I do hate when I slip there ;( ) , security this troubles me to no end.

Your finger prints are so sacred that to have to give them up are a violation of civil rights? That doesn't mean I condone the misuse of such info mind you, but like any type of tech/info it can be misused. Punish/legislate that, not the tech/info itself please.

Dernit Nydia I usually hold your opinions in high esteem but I find it very troubling that you would cry foul as if something was taken from you.

What's next, harkening back to the cultures that feel a part of their soul was ripped away when photographed?

You can't have it both ways, you can't be protected and keep the miscreants at bay and not have to have something minor as finger prints on file. I could understand DNA, kinda (tho I find this arguement weak to the extreme) but fingerprints? If you do no wrong then those prints sit on file causing no harm. Hell you could go missing and your fingerprint found at some bus stop could lead to your discovery.

I'm ranting a bit, I find it offputting to see Civil rights thrown in as a sort of catch all. I don't see where this is violation of Civil Rights at all.

The main problem with fingerprints as identification is that once the information is compromised, you can't simply grow a new set of fingerprints. Compare that with, say, credit card information. If your card is stolen or the information is leaked, the card can be cancelled and you can be issued a new one.

Dear Fandros:

I hadn't had my coffee yet when I wrote that this morning, so I apologize if it was less than coherent, but just to be clear, I don't take issue with our long historied practice of fingerprinting someone when they are arrested in this country, sharing that information with other law enforcement agencies, or even with the use of a device such as the one mentioned in the article for the purposes of a random survey for research purposes, but rather with several things:

1) the disturbing trend our administration has had, in the post 9/11 world, of identifying everyone who has ever been arrested for a misdemeanor, or picked up on 'suspicion' of something, as a dangerous individual who needs to be monitored, restricted in their movements, and/or locked up for an indeterminate period of time (this is where the 'civil rights' issue comes in), inside this country or out;

2) the belief, akin to the belief in faeries, that ever-broadening and tightening measures of surveillance are actually going to 'protect' us from folks who actually want to do harm to our country (I'm not saying that we should engage in no surveillance at all, but there is a cost/benefit dropoff, beyond which one pays huge costs in both expense and lost liberty for marginal increases in safety, and we passed it a long time ago);

3) the whole 'taking it to the terrorists' mindset, aka the belief that we, as members of one sovereign nation, have the right to 'push back our borders' via actions inside other sovereign nations (covert actions and/or 'proactive' war and/or massive interventionism internally in other countries)

4) the belief that such measures are going to do anything about the underlying conditions/policies that are producing said IED manufacturers in the first place (not to mention the fact that the actual suicide bombers, etc, are usually naive recruits, or, as in the case of the 9/11 bombers, folks with no criminal records)

5) the willingness and eagerness of our current government to want to expand such not-intrinsically-a-bad-thing measures as this as broadly as possible.

In short, what I was taking issue with was not the technological application or survey results themselves, but what both the manufacturers of the technology, and the FBI and other spokespersons quoted in the article, both thought should be done and *believed* could be done with them.

Regards,
Nydia

Parking tickets...the gateway crime! Studies show that a number of people who have received parking tickets have eventually graduated to international terrorism.

Also note that 100% of those held as terrorists have at least one time riden a bicycle, which shows that bicycle riding is one of the early steps to islamo-fascism.

You can't have it both ways, you can't be protected and keep the miscreants at bay and not have to have something minor as finger prints on file.

You know who I'd like to be protected from? Our government. In my eyes, it poses the largest "terror" threat to my way of life.

Have we become such cowards that we're happy to toss centuries of hard won freedom away, in desperate hopes of being safe from the brownish people? Seriously? Disgusting.

Freedom works like this:

The more you have, the less the government does.

The more the government has, the less you do.

You simply cannot keep feeding the beast and expect it not to devour us at some point. I do not want to be in their files or in their system or identified by their algorithms. We cannot allow ourselves to be constantly survailed, monitored, profiled and fit nicely into shiney metal boxes all in the name of keeping us safe.
Fuck that. How about we keep the government out of our heads.