Amanda Warren
Travel becomes truly ominous...
In a trend that isn't wholly surprising, EU Observer reports:
US citizens and other non-EU nationals who enter Europe will be asked to have their faces image-captured and fingerprints scanned upon arrivalat a half-dozen major airports. [emphasis added]
This "biometric dragnet" is the pilot test for the EU's new "smart borders" packages. The test portion will run March - September 2015, for starters. The commission originally proposed this package in 2013 but pulled it and began revising. While there is some opposition, the experiment is shortly underway.
The captures include fingerprint scans, iris scans and facial recognition scans for all forms of European travel - road, train, sea and air.
Of course, what's usual for such programs - travelers can refuse...for now. But officials are letting travelers know through the media that it will become mandatory in time.
Nicholas West
Despite the FBI already having been sued by privacy groups amid plans for a nationwide biometric database, it has officially gone live. The Next Generation Identification system will eventually include iris scans, facial recognition, and a range of other biometric identifiers that are collated into a central database for real-time sharing at all levels of law enforcement and government agencies.
As suspected, what began as a border control initiative has now expanded to include everyone.
As the video report below highlights, this billion-dollar program was spearheaded by Lockheed Martin, and will invariably include images of even non-suspects in one great sweeping dragnet of digital surveillance. The fact that Lockheed Martin was involved in developing the program should signal heightened concern given their integral role in drone technology. As this database is being rolled out, drones are set to take to American skies in much greater numbers by 2015. One of the latest military-grade systems can now scan 36 million faces per second, or every face in the U.S. within 10 seconds. It is a technology that has trickled down from use in war zones like Afghanistan. The merger between this FBI database and drone technology would be the next logical step.
There simply has been too much invested in a coming Minority Report world to turn back now. Nevertheless, we at least have reached a critical mass of ideological pushback against agencies like the NSA. Could additional leaks from whistleblowers and the work of digital privacy activists help to thwart plans to enter all of us into the real-time surveillance matrix? Or will this technology expand and reach its full potential?
