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British Airport Will Require Fingerprints From Domestic Passengers
ProfBooty brings us a story about England's Heathrow airport, which will begin fingerprinting passengers on its domestic flights later this month. Airport executives claim that the data will be stored for no longer than 24 hours, and will not be shared with law enforcement. We've previously discussed airport fingerprinting measures in the United States and Japan. Quoting:
"All four million domestic passengers who will pass through Terminal 5 annually after it opens on March 27 will have four fingerprints taken, as well as being photographed, when they check in. To ensure the passenger boarding the aircraft is the same person, the fingerprinting process will be repeated just before they board the aircraft and the photograph will be compared with their face. Dr Gus Hosein, of the London School of Economics, an expert on the impact on technology on civil liberties, is one of the scheme's strongest critics. He said: 'There is no other country in the world that requires passengers travelling on internal flights to be fingerprinted. BAA says the fingerprint data will be destroyed, but the records of who has travelled within the country will not be, and it will provide a rich source of data for the police and intelligence agencies.'"
And Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
What the hell is going on these last few years?! Ever since some wackos killed less people than die from AIDS in a day the US, UK, and AU seem hell bent racing each other to see who can become China first! It's time to face the fact: the terrorists have won. Not flamebait, just a sober realization.
Shh.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
"The company said the move had been necessitated by the design of Terminal 5, where international and domestic passengers share the same lounges and public areas after they have checked in. "
Nothing to add here.
A totally usless security measure. If you want to prevent hijacking of aircraft "reinforce the flight deck door and then lock the flight deck door". This was first recomended in the 1970's and if this recomendation had been followed by the airline industry then 9/11 could never have happened.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
I see your Orwellian fear and raise you Brazil !!
These measures that are being taken to supposedly make things safer are just getting out of hand. I am getting pissed off, but I am also getting scared. I do not want to live in a police state. And it is getting where there is nowhere to go if my government finally gets too much like a police state. While I don't think that there will be a sudden shift to a police state, it is getting easier and easier for a government to become one. The technology is here and the first steps have been taken. It's just a matter of "Oh they won't mind a little more surveillance." All this "security" does not make me feel any safer: I am more likely to die from a car crash then from a hijacked plane. While it might reduce the risks involved in flying, my number 1 fear while flying is that the plane will crash, and that rarely happens so I am not that afraid of it. There are so many other things to say on this subject. It hasn't gotten to the level of stupidity, but its getting damn close.
They're not waiting for Terminal 5, I was photographed and fingerprinted like a criminal today on my way home from a meeting in Hamburg, via Heathrow Terminal 1. I wasn't happy, why should I as a UK passport holder have my fingerprints taken? It's a police state.
Luckily, the country isn't so large that other forms of travel are not feasible.
Not like in the US, where if you're in NY, trying to go to LA (or other destinations west), air travel is one of the few options available.
I'm starting to wonder if there's some running joke, or competition, between lawmakers/politicians in the US and UK, seeing who can come up with the most idiotic, errrr I mean, essential to safety and liberty, stresses on freedom. Or maybe they're angling for the population to revolt.
Either way, laws like this win. If you follow them, you'll be safe, and so we must maintain them, because to maintain freedom and safety, we must be EVER VIGILANT. If they are broken, or cause civil unrest, they are justified in their creation, because look how many people there will be who want to wreak havoc on safety and order.
I never fly, unless absolutely necessary. If they want to make poorly thought regulation part of the new safety routine, I don't involve myself.
The measures we go through to stop terrorism have reached such a point of insanity that I am simply blown away. The way to react to a tiny handful of deaths has been so out of proportion to the threat, that I wake up thankful every single day that US Constitution provides at least some (admittedly constantly weakening) safeguards against democracy.
This latest scheme in Britain is just one more example of the utter insanity of the masses and their complete and utter inability to make rational decisions. You are radically more likely to be killed by your pool or a car than you are to be struck down by a terrorist. Despite this, we go through insane, fanatical, and expensive measures to prevent one of the rarest ways to die in a western democracy. Death through airplane exploded by terrorist rates somewhere near the absolute bottom in terms of likely ways to die... well below being struck down by lightening.
Honestly, I think that we have seen why democracies don't work. If we continue down this utterly insane path spending more and more resources to defend utterly insignificant attacks with wildly out of proportion, expensive, AND a costly to civil liberties methods, we might actually succeed where terrorist always fail. Terrorist in the west always fail to cause any real significant or costly damage. Even 9/11 was a drop in the bucket next to auto accident, cancer, heart attacks, or hurricanes. Yet, we treat a tragedy that can normally be shrugged off without flinching in such a violent way that we cause incalculable harm to ourselves. The money and lives lost in the response to 9/11 or the London bombings make the actual attacks like like pock change.
It is like getting a pin prick on your finger tip and responding by chopping your own arm off. Uh, yeah, you can't get pin pricked again... but you chopped off your fucking arm.
As much as I want to blame the politicians/corporations/neo-cons/fill-in-evil-entity-of-choice-here, the real problem is democracy. A system that changes itself in response to the utterly stupid and irrational emotions of the masses dooms itself. What is the alternative? The hell of I know. I thought that the US constitution offers up a good alternative to democracy as it seems to be written in pretty clear and absolute language. Despite this, the US has reverted to democracy in its most vile of forms. It might not be as far gone as Britain, but it is desperately trying. I honestly don't know the answer You can't ignore the irrational masses as you will fall into the trap of tyranny. That said, if you listen to the stupid cows, you get this crap, which is tyranny in another form.
"Airport executives claim that the data will be stored for no longer than 24 hours, and will not be shared with law enforcement."
Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
Since all the previous airport hassles have FAILED at improving security, they need to resort to even more random bullshit.
Let's face it: there is no methodical screening process that can properly account for the fact that people hate your country. This has nothing to do with terrorism, at least not the kind that the WTC was blamed on. Hell, if I were pissed off enough and just happened to have the resources to blow shit up, I would be somewhat tempted to raise hell in Washington or Buckingham or any other fucked up nation. That's the kind of anger these totalitarian regimes trigger within my gut. It feels fundamentally wrong and people get extreme reactions.
I say reverse the trend, make the airlines normal again as they were in the 80s and 90s. Who cares if people are "smuggling" drugs, or if someone just happens to be second cousin once removed to the groundskeeper of a member of the Bin Laden family ? Who really fucking cares ? They're on a plane, and they're travelling. If the US Government hadn't been shitting on Iraq for the last two decades, maybe those folks wouldn't be so angry in the first place. Then again, maybe someone would have detonated the WTC anyway just to instigate this mess, it has been the single most powerful event of this decade, and its effects are still expanding six years later with no loss of momentum.
The way I see it, if this keeps up, soon enough it's going to be USA vs everyone else in the world. For every force, there is an equal and opposite force. Americans don't want that, and the world doesn't want that, but keep shoving people around and eventually the nukes will fly.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
inflatable copilot.
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
Having traveled a bit, I feel confident saying that Wikipedia's worldwide list of airports is what you're looking for.
>"Then why are you doing it?"
It's a way of gently easing the metaphorical butt-cheeks of the British public apart. It's what they did with Traffic cameras. First it was just about license plate data for the congestion charge, and we were all assured that it wouldn't capture images of faces or be used by the police ... Fast Forward a year or two, and faces are captured and the police have full unfettered access - to fight terrorism and organised crime ... and petty crime ... and political dissenters ...
They want to have their own way with you, so they open you up with a finger, apply a little lurication and allow you to fully relax before they bring out the truncheon.
Give it a year or so and our collective sphincters will have unclenched and our glorious overlords will tell us they need the data to protect us (coz they really love us) and it'll all be added into our permanent files.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
End the dependence of the western world on mid-east oil.
Once the Saudi's have only the Chinese as customers, anything
that happens in the middle east becomes irrelavent to the western world.
When middle-eastern economies degrade to the point that they have to depend
on sand as an export product, all this nonsense will stop.
However, as long as American presidents like Bush hold hands with
Saudi princes, we will never be rid of the 'terrorists' and we will have to put
up with this, and worse, until the oil runs out.
Sig this!
Another country to add to my list of places not to visit...
The UK government has a long and rich history of allowing the police and secret service to get away with pretty much anything they like. What you get if it leaks is some blip in the press, that takes a few days and then things will progress as before.
:-).
You make take it as significant that since New Labour came to power there has been a sharp decline in people being ejected from their posts for abject failure, even the guy responsible for the process failures that led to the loss of 2 CDs with the details of several million people on did not actually lose his job after he "resigned", he now works in a much cushier position at Cabinet Office. Yes, that's right, in principle a promotion. That's a subtle hint of how New Labour thinks about privacy.
It follows thus that what Heathrow management says and what really will happen is VERY likely to be different, or it will be a weasel argument as "WE only keep it 24h, but it's not our fault the police takes a copy at 12h and we don't know what they do with it". I hope they have at least the intelligence to store the fingerprints as a hash, but given the predicted leak I am willing to bet that it's full imagery.
And in that case, imagine what may be on the next CDs (sorry DVDs - fingerprints need space) that will be lost? Exactly, the one bit of data you normally control because you have it physically on you, and the one aspect you can't change other than with judicious use of a sharp knife or strong acid (apparently, never felt the need for it myself
I will avoid any route going through terminal 5. What's more, as that is a BA terminal it's a good argument to avoid flying BA altogether - from what I've heard (since the luggage debacle) that's not a bad idea anyway.
Or investigate fake fingers..
Insert
The Lib Dems may well hold the balance, and they dissent from the major parties on this issue. They also have a few heavyweights who know how the world works and are critical of it - Vince Cable is a former chief economist of Shell, no less, and has just delivered a speech attacking the failure to tax rich immigrants.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."