British to fingerprint and iris-scan all children aged 11-16
Leaked documents from the Home Office outrage privacy advocates; children’s data to be stored by the Immigration and Nationality Directorate until age 16, when information will be added to the National Identity Register; compulsory ID cards to be delayed until 2019
When opportunity knocks, will our readers be there to pick up any latent fingerprints? That is the question now that the Times of London is reporting a secret U.K. scheme to take finger, iris, and facial scans of all children aged eleven to sixteen as part of the coming roll-out of biometric ePassports and identification cards. According to leaked Home Office planning, more than 500,000 children will be enrolled each year in databases used by the Immigration and Nationality Directorate to store the fingerprints of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers. When they turn sixteen — and here is another business opportunity — the files will be transferred to the National Identity Register.
The documents also show that the government’s planned ID cards will not be made compulsory for more than a decade. “Compulsion will be triggered once 80 percent take-up is achieved in [the first quarter of] 2019,” they state. “It is assumed that, following compulsion, a 100 percent registration will be achieved two years later.” Nevertheless, privacy advocates are aghast, as is the minority Conservative party, which has long battled Prime Minister Tony Blair on his perceived mania for biometrics identification. “This borders on the sinister and it shows the government is trying to end the presumption of innocence. With the fingerprinting of all our children, this government is clearly determined to enforce major changes in the relationship between the citizen and the state in a way never seen before,” said shadow home secretary David Davis, who swears that if the Conservatives comes to power the plan (so far as children go) will be scrapped.
-read more in David Leppard’s London Times report
