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UK Police Implement Roadside Fingerprinting Tools
mormop writes to tell us the BBC is reporting that police in the UK have implemented a pilot program that allows officers to fingerprint drivers using a small handheld scanner connected to a database of approximately 6.5 million prints. From the article: "Officers promise prints will not be kept on file but concerns have been raised about civil liberties. [...] It is primarily aimed at motorists because banned or uninsured drivers often give false names, although pedestrians could also be asked to give prints if they are suspected to have committed an offence."
My work here is dung.
will i get fingerprinted if i ask for link?
always mosh clockwise
Am I missing something (which is possible, since there's no article to reference), or are they spending a ton of money to solve a problem with a simple solution?
... meaning they wouldn't have been caught by the finger printing method either.
Their rational is that "it is primarily aimed at motorists because banned or uninsured drivers often give false names". Isn't this what a Driver's License is for? Or do British not have licenses (or not require that drivers carry licenses)?
If someone doesn't have a license, or any other form of photo identification, they probably shouldn't be driving. It sounds like it would be far cheaper (and less of a privacy concern) to haul in anybody driving without a valid photo ID, since these people are more likely to be uninsured or banned.
Or if the thought of hauling in folks without IDs is unappealing (since many people just forget to carry IDs), police could just ask the person a few key questions (such as name, address, city, maybe some type of social security #), which would be in the police database. Then this could be cross referenced against the auto registration. Seems easy to verify that the individual is telling the truth using existing data without resorting to finger prints.
Of course, you could have someone who stole their neighbors car + memorized their name/address/social, but this type of person would have probably created a good fake ID as well
Huh? Don't mind me, I'm just the new guy.
but the summary isn't that good.
Privacy is a myth.
I did a search a for a company I hadn't done business with in 10 years (no kidding) and visited their website for the first time ever and a week later their catalog showed up in the mail.
Somehow they had the cookies and partnerships to identify me and send me a catalog in my name.
If that's the extent of privacy anyway, then I have no problem with people being stopped with reason being required to give fingerprints. In fact, I think the same should be required on any flight entering or leaving the country, if it isn't already. And those should be stored.
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Hmmm this isn't good. I wonder if they will simply record the prints for checking against a db later, or if they have wireless abilities to check for a match at the scene? If they don't then they soon will.
That technology would be very likely to be subject to function-creep. I could imagine a lot of situations where it might be argued that on-the-spot print-matching would protect 'us', from age-checks when buying alcohol, to entitlement to emergency medical care, and more.
I am afraid that way too many people will cheerfully abandon privacy if they think it will save them in tax.
Not that I am paranoid, or anything.
It is only a matter of time until a suitable technology arises that can accurately verify identities in a non intrusive way.
For example:
Everybody knows that the one who does the technological breakthrough will be very rich - it is only a matter of time. Then we human beings will be exactly like cars- with an (invisible) license plate.
There also was that street fee thing, but I forget what that was all about. Sounds like the beginnings of a police state to me.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I submitted this 6 hours before this one was sumbitted.... but because scuttlemonkey is a regular submitter mine gets binned and it included the link to the BBC story as well.
Yes I know I'm going to get modded down.... but as it seems to be only the favourites here who are allowed to submit... sod it.
See? They promise not to abuse their power, so it's all okey-dokey. They won't put all your information in a huge database and track your every move until the day you lie deep in the cold, cold ground and are no longer a threat.
Probable cause? What a quaint, old-fashioned notion! Today, if you really piss them off, they can just call you an enemy combatant and disappear your ass to Gitmo. You can talk to your extreme renditioner "Mr Smith" about probable cause all day long while he's making you think you're going to drown and hooking your nuts up to a car battery. Don't fret, though. If you haven't done anything wrong, then you don't have anything to worry about. Just sit back, relax, and watch your rights sail out the window like everyone else's while we band together to bring those big bad terrorists, immigrants, uninsured motorists, pedophiles, deadbeat dads, and jaywalkers to justice.
Jebus, people. This is really getting out of control.
They say " pedestrians could also be asked to give prints if they are suspected to have committed an offence".
Considering that anyone can be suspected of anything, this opens the gates for totally random fingerprinting in the street. We already have random checks and detentions for the flimsiest of reasons. Consider the 34 year old woman labeled a terrorist for walking along a cycle path, the stopping and searching of an 11 year old girl near an RAF base, "the detention of a 21 year old student for taking pictures of the M3 motorway for a web-design company", the ejection of an 82 year old man at the 2005 Labour Party conference, and the detention of an 80-year-old man carrying an anti-Blair placard, for example. If you refuse, the precedents set by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, Terrorism Act 2000, and Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 would ensure it unlikely you'd get off scott-free but instead become more of a suspect.
Still, I'm not going to do anything about it other than complain about it online, as is my wont. In another 50 years when I'm eating my Soylent Green in my 29th-floor bugged apartment, I can pull out ruffled print-outs of Web pages like these, and think back to a time when at least my bowel movements weren't RFID tagged and scanned for prohibited substances.
Basically, the British government is corrupt to the core and bordering on fascist. But.. what government isn't these days?
They'll just invent some form of "implied consent" just like they do when you're driving a car.
Eventually it's going to get to the point where just by walking out of your house in the morning, you're going to automatically "consent" to being fingerprinted, having your DNA sequenced, your retinas scanned, and your anus probed; and if you don't, they'll invent some sort of punishment for noncompliance. Or just Mace the hell out of you and do it anyway.
Sure, they'll say, you don't have to consent -- you can just live inside your house 24/7. Just like, theoretically, you can walk everywhere instead of driving a car. By creating a totally impractical straw man, they allow you a "choice" to give up your rights, only without any other realistic option.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Seems like the easier solution, and the far less creepy one, is just to hook the police cars up with terminals that communicate with the drivers-license database, including its photos.
When you get pulled over, you'd either present your license, which they could then take back to their patrol car (or just note the number) and run into the system to find if it's suspended, or if you forgot your license, they could look you up based on name/address/DOB and using the photo attached to the record in the system, see that it's you. That also makes it harder to use a fake license, since it wouldn't come up in the system, or to use someone else's license, because the photo on the record wouldn't be you. It also lets the police use a much bigger / higher quality photo (on the screen) for identification, than the crappy one on the license itself.
That wouldn't require any more data collection than what they assumedly have already (assuming they use photographic drivers licenses and that the photos are digitized), and it doesn't involve sampling previously uncollected data from lots of people. Randomly fingerprinting people is tres creepy, in my opinion.
I've never really looked too hard at the systems in use here in the U.S., but I think that they work something like this. (The cities that have in-car computer systems, anyway.) I'm sure that whoever makes these systems would be happy to demo them in Britain.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Jebus, people. This is really getting out of control.
/. guy I love all the technology but if it's used to enslave mankind to the machine no amount of blue LEDs is gonna make up for it.
I know. But like the frog slowly being brought to boil not enough people will get this until it is too late. Heck, it probably is too late already. I worry all the time about this and although the majority of people I know and work with agree to some extent nobody is really in a position to do anything about it. Who wants to stick their neck out and maybe get arrested and banned from travelling for instance?
Conclusion: we're screwed and it will only get worse.
PS: As a typical
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
If they don't retain fingerprint data, just what exactly are they matching the drivers' fingerprints to?
People around here are (rightfully) always quoting the Constitution. Allow me to take a line or two from one of our other venerated documents.
Although I think a fingerprint can be used to distinguish among a small number of people, it has never been demonstrated, to my knowledge, to be useable to locate a person in a multi-million-person database. The US and UK pretend to have this capability, but I don't think it has ever been demonstrated in a public (much less peer-reviewed, double-blind) test. If I am wrong, please reply to this with references.
Routine, un-targeted fingerprinting of this kind is a method for scaring people, not catching people.
David W. Hogg -- assoc prof, NYU Physics
The best part about this is that if you refuse the roadside test, they can arrest you, take you back to the station and get your FULL fingerprints (rather than the index finger only that the roadside test takes).
I find it pretty disgusting that the first time we hear of the system its already out there and ready to be used. What happened to discussing these things, getting opinions, considering the implications. Or dare I say was it rushed out to avoid exactly those kinds of questions.
Of course that is what they said about DNA sampling in the UK. Then when they found out the police had been illegally storing a massive database, they just changed the law to make it legal. At that point with the obvious duplicity of the police I decided there and then I'd just refuse full stop to help them in any way. They will do the same with the fingerprint checker, I have no doubt of that.
I was being wry.
The point is this - of course pedophiles and terrorists are bad. Real pedophiles and terrorists that is, not the spectres of terrorism and pedophilia that are held up and shaken around in front of your eyes as boogeymen of the week to keep you in line.
If you really think any of the thinly disguised rights-grabbing that's going on these days has anything to do with actual threats - brother, you have got some waking up to do.
Quote: "The portable gadgets - similar to a pocket PC and linked to a database of 6.5m prints - will enable officers to identify suspects within minutes".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6170070.stm
Well, like I always said - you can be identified with a remote device - the carrying of ID cards is a Red Herring.
You always carry your biometrics with you.
Our UK government will have effectively branded you with a unique number - like the Nazi's did to the Jews at Auschwitz.
Rather than being identified by a tattoo on arm - you will be identified with a scanner - like an animal that has been 'chipped'.
In their usual devious way - government will say it is because they 'care' for the safety of the public - when we know ID cards would not have stopped London bombing - nor did they stop Madrid.
This from a UK government that helped force their corrupt form of US friendly 'democracy' on Iraqi people - our government are no more than dictatorial authoritarian fascist reactionaries themselves.
This is not the sort of 'caring' that true democratic governments would want - one which keeps record of movements and associations of individual members of public - with no privacy.
As to the ID system itself:
With computing power doubling every year (and software/firmware enhancements) this identification will get down to seconds when National ID Surveillance System is compulsively introduced - even though database will increase ten-fold.
Even with current technology - using 1 finger it will correctly identify 19 out of 20 people (95%) - with 2 fingers it will increase accuracy to 19.95 out of 20 (i.e. correctly identifying 19 with no match out of 20 - or 99.75%) - with 3 fingers this will be near 100% accuracy.
NB: iris and 1 finger scan will produce similar accurate result.