Imagine if there were a knock at your door one day and you opened it to find a troop of heavily armed men.
Then imagine these men required you to give your fingerprints, a retinal eye scan, and a digital photo, all to be entered into a global database. It's all part of a "routine census patrol," you are told.
Imagine then having to give your fingerprints or eye scan in order to apply for a job, receive your paycheck or even pass checkpoints situated around the town where you live.
Echoes of
1984? Scary beyond all reason? In Privacy-conscious America, it would probably cause widespread rioting. (at least I hope it would.)
This very scenario is the reality on the ground today in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In my
recent report on biometrics, I explained how this technology is helping keep our troops safer in the war zone. It's hard to criticize these measures - they've been directly responsible for much of the turnaround that the war has taken in recent months. It's now very hard for bad guys to move around anonymously. Where at one time, an insurgent could work for the Coalition forces doing road construction by day, then sneak back at night to emplace IED's on the same road, now is much more risky. That's because when a local citizen turns in the IED and it's dusted for fingerprints, they can instantly find out that Achmed the ditch digger is leading a double life.
In a place where cars, donkey carts, bicycles and
burqua-clad women are often used in suicide attacks, biometric scanning has proven to be a very effective means of dealing with the threat. The military has been forced to resort to such Orwellian measures to clamp down on the violence. And it's working.
Personally, it worries me for that very reason. Biometric accountability is so effective that it's only a matter of time before someone suggests we try it in Detroit, or Denver public schools, or the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. Already there is a
push to require (digitally activated) passports on all domestic flights in the United States in the next few years.
Most likely it's inevitable. But I don't like the idea of my biometric data residing in a worldwide database that can help track me wherever I go. It seems like
one more step toward world government. But since I, too, was given the biometric shakedown when I entered Iraq back in December, I guess it's too late for me. I'll never be anonymous again.
Scary? Leave a comment and tell us what you think.
Chuck Holton
www.livefire.us
