Duncan Gardham in the Telegraph today picks up on Charles Clarke’s abuse of royal prerogative in his article Fingerprint passports will be ‘ID card by stealth’. The plot thickens, though, as it appears that in the face of growing criticism the government are now trying to deny what they said to The Guardian yesterday:

But the Home Office told silicon.com that no “formal decision whether to go ahead and include a second biometric” in the new ‘ePassport’ has been made. – ‘Government denies passport fingerprinting plan’ in silicon.com

Oh, really?

Has Charles Clarke, or has he not, “authorised the passport service to acquire 70 new passport service offices”? If the decision has not yet been made to add fingerprints and/or other biometrics to passports then how can UKPS justify their massive (estimated) increase in annual expenditure to £450 million? The cost of putting just a digitised photo onto a chip on your passport – the only actual international requirement for biometrics on machine-readable travel documents – simply doesn’t add up.

The decison has been made to create a massive centralised biometric database, and to ‘hide’ this behind our passports at least until the network of enrollment centres and infrastructure is in place to coerce or compel people onto it. Fingerprinting and iris-scanning plus interrogation before you can go on holiday, or travel for business abroad will become the norm as quickly as the government can make it so. UKPS will rapidly become the government’s ‘Identity Agency’ as their Five-Year Plan [816KB PDF] clearly shows. And ID cards will be used to track more than just movements across borders, as they are deliberately and sytematically insinuated into more and more aspects of our daily lives.

This entry was posted by phil on Wednesday, April 13th, 2005 at 14:36 and is filed under Anti, Biometrics, UK News Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.