Thursday, January 27, 2005

The Police are Ready

Talkin of reminders, here's one to highlight the extent to which the police stand to benefit from proposed identification schemes. Cards are still on the starting stretch, but the networks exist already to implement much of what people fear about an ID system:

Police to use roadside fingerprint technology if SOCA Bill is passed

"Suspects without sufficient identification will have to place their finger on the electronic device, which will link to records kept on the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System."

Exercise for the reader: Define "suspect".

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really hope there is enough resistance to this ID nonsense and people resist but... given the most obvious (and malevolent) use for the system why will they listen to anyone. Like they say, if voting changed anything...

Scribe said...

The last, best hope of course will be if (/when?) the system fails utterly to do anything it promised. 1 dramatic failure would be the systems never working (most likely). Another is that someone carries out a suicide attack on the Houses of Parliament with a valid (read "trusted") ID Card.

Politicians need real world proof that things don't work. That's seems to be often how the public sector works, I've noticed.