Biometrics: Part 2
Posted by VickyC on April 29th, 2010
Ok, so I did a post a few months back on biometrics.. I was just watching the UK Prime Minsters Debate and Gordon Brown was talking about how biometric passports have been integrated in an attempt to help curb illegal immigration.
Um… Ok, as Clegg brought up, you cannot control immigration from countries from within the EU. I’m not going to get into this whole immigration argument, but sadly, he’s right. Within the EU, anything goes. They can’t really track anyone. It’s a bit ridiculous. People are given free reign to come and go as they please.
Speaking of which, I flew into London Luton Airport last month. It was a Friday at around 8 am. I got off the plane and walked into the terminal – to be met by about 50,000 people. It seemed that about 20 flights had landed at the same time! “Oh god,” I thought to myself, “it’s going to take HOURS go get through customs!” But then I remembered the fancy biometric passport machines with the retina scanner (which I wrote about in my previous post). So, with a new found spring in my step, I head towards the customs desks, following the giant biometric passport symbol and the hoards and hoards of people. As I come towards the partition that leads past the zigzagging line of bodies waiting to go through passport control, and along to the biometric passport reader, I realise – with horror – that it’s closed. “Bloody machines must be broken”, I thought to myself. And I began the slow treck towards passport control.
After only about 10 minutes (surprisingly), I make it to the desk, and a nice customs officer checks my passport. “Are your machines broken”, I ask him, motioning towards the row of biometric machines behind him. “Oh, no”, he replied, “they’re only on for certain hours during the day”. He hands my passport back to me. “What, the quietest ones”, I ask him, before turning around to stare at the ever growing crowd behind me and then proceeding to walk towards the baggage carousels.
It wasn’t until after I got home that I reaslied how ridiculous it was. How much money was spent on these machines? And they only have them running a few hours each day?! Why? It can’t be because of a lack of man-power.. It just made me even more irritated. Not only are they keeping all of this data to turn the world into a Orwellian 1984 type scenario, they’re spending a HELL of a lot of money trying to do it!
On a side note, my passport has a plastic page in it which contains the chip. It’s a few mm thick and the chip and wires clearly visible through the clear plastic. My boyfriend just got a Hungarian passport, which also bears the biometric chip logo. But, I can’t tell where the hell it is! There is no plastic page, there is no thicker page, there is nothing at all to indicate where the chip on this passport is. He was fingerprinted and retina scanned when he got his passport, so obviously the information is on there somewhere.. but did they manage to make these chips paper thin?! Can anyone shed some light on this?!
Tags: Airport, Biometric, Biometrics, Clone, Database, Europe, Eye, Fingerprint, Government, International, Iris, London Luton, News, Orwellian, Passport, Privacy, Retina, RFID, Scan, society, UK, World
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Why the gods allow this sort of thing to continue is a mystery.
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