Mandatory fingerprinting of new UK passport applicants is to
begin next year, as a "building block" for a future ID card scheme,
according to a
Guardian report The Government's ID Card Bill
was spiked after the election was announced, but the Government is
said to contend that as passports are issued under royal
prerogative, it doesn't need legislation to demand fingerprints
from passport applicants.
So it's all going to be the Queen's fault, apparently. The
intention is to require fingerprints from all those applying for
their first passport from next year, with fingerprinting of those
renewing existing passports to be phased in subsequently. First
time applicants will have to attend one of 70 new passport offices
for interview from next year, and can therefore be fingerprinted at
the same time. From the point of view of passport security,
interviewing of first time applicants is quite possibly a sensible
move, because it will tend to reduce the success rate of fraudulent
applicants. Hoovering up fingerprints at the same time, however, is
quite another matter.
David Blunkett's Home Office peddled the fiction that
international biometric passport requirements meant that most of
the expense of the ID card scheme would have to be undertaken
anyway, thus making the ID card itself a fairly small additional
hurdle to cross. Neither of these claims is true. ICAO only
requires a facial biometric on the passport (in mere mortalspeak, a
digitised version of a normal passport photo is all we're talking
about here). The EU intends to require fingerprints in addition to
digitised mugshot, but because of its Schengen opt-out the UK isn't
obliged to follow suit. So nobody's forcing us to have fingerprints
on passports, and parliament has not yet approved any ID scheme
that the fingerprints to be collected would be used for.
Provided it wins the election Blair's Labour Party intends to
reintroduce its ID card plans, but it would then have to draft a
new Bill and steer it through the new Parliament successfully, so
going ahead with a major building block anyway seems just a tad
presumptuous. But we have what we think is a highly plausible Black
Helicopter scenario here - what if the national fingerprint
database is not necessarily just a building block for an
ID card scheme?
It is intended that police will be able to run routine scene
of crime checks against the passport fingerprint database. This
database will eventually contain data for most of the people in the
UK, and progressive expansion of police fingerprinting powers has
meant the police's own database is now quite substantial. The ID
scheme that hasn't quite happened yet proposed to house the
population's personal database in the national identity register,
allegedly with adequate safeguards, but a passport fingerprint
database effectively produces the guts of the ID scheme without the
need for any safeguards, oversight, parliamentary approval or
scrutiny.
The Government would therefore have biometric-linked data for
everyone who has a passport or has been arrested (they get to keep
the prints even if you're innocent), which would take it most of
the way towards the national identity register even if it never
quite got around to passing ID card legislation. The mere existence
of this database would provide a handy jumping off point for future
extension - one could, for example, reintroduce the notion of a
"voluntary" ID card to make it easier to access Government services
and simply to establish your identity "incontrovertibly."
It's possible that those pushing for the rapid expansion of a
fingerprint database see it as providing some kind of crime-solving
magic bullet. Such a belief, however, requires a substantial level
of technical illiteracy. A fingerprint in a passport or ID card
provides a reasonably accurate mechanism for the identification of
an individual because you're simply comparing the actual finger
with its purported print. It gets a little more complicated if
you're doing an online check of a finger against a fingerprint
database in order to establish someone's identity, but so long as
both prints have been taken under comparable conditions, in
principle it shouldn't be too hard to get a match, if one
exists.
Scene of crime fingerprints are however an entirely different
matter. These will be of varying quality, in many cases they will
only be partial prints, and although it is possible to use some
automation to narrow the search, human expertise is needed in order
to establish a reasonable degree of certainty. Trawling a database
of the entire UK population would therefore produce a fairly large
number of possible matches, but would then require a very large
number of fingerprint experts to narrow them down. At which point,
other problems would arise. At the moment possible matches obtained
by the police will almost always lead them to a suspect who has
already been arrested for something, and who will therefore not
necessarily be shocked, stunned or outraged by being asked to
account for his movements on the night in question.
Once the fingerprint database of the future is live, however,
that will not be the case, and it will only be a matter of time
before a false match IDs a nun. Or a Home Secretary.
