ATS: Ridge Pushes for International Biometric Standards

Tom Ridge alarmed privacy groups today when he called for U.S. citizens to include fingerprints in their passports. "I believe that if we ask the rest of the world to put fingerprints on their passports, we should put fingerprints on our passports," he said. He then stated that there should be a push for an international biometric standard saying the sooner this was accomplished the safer it would make our countries.



One of the main concerns in including fingerprints with in an electronic passports is that the data can be read up to 30 feet away. People with the right technology could steal your Social Security number along with your fingerprints. The data on the passport chip could be encrypted, but this would impose a difficulty on foreign countries who were needing the information upon arrival in their country. What is needed is an international standard for encrypting and decrypting the data stored on the chip to ensure the privacy of the holder was maintained.

[edit on 12-1-2005 by dbates]

Ohhh this is going to throw our New World Order contingency into overdrive. However, it makes sence and recently the EU was working on standardizing thier database and the like. Coordination of these resources seems to be they way to go and would make it efficent to catch the bad guys. The question is is it worth the inherent loss of some of our rights to privacy.

Hrm, I wonder if by an 'international standard' they mean one motherlode database of all that information? It seems every time we turn around what few eggs are left are being combined into one basket ripe for the plucking. Every day we hear about a high level penetration of a senstive customer database on some companies server, what will the world say when it wakes up one day and reads the headlines "World Information Database Stolen!"?

Originally posted by alternateheaven
... what will the world say when it wakes up one day and reads the headlines "World Information Database Stolen!"?

Hmmm. I think you have something there. ...What if everyone in the world knew everything, and information was no longer a valuable, saleable commodity?

Yeah. Open Access.


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[edit on 12-1-2005 by soficrow]