Fingerprints read at a distance

Over the years, fingerprinting has evolved from an inky mess to pressing fingers on sensor screens to even a few touch-free systems that work at a short distance. Now a company has developed a prototype of a device that can scan fingerprints from up to two meters away

Fingerprints read at a distance

Perhaps it is time to wear gloves

Im going to jump on a boat to Haiti.
Spend a few days there you know, hang with Sean Penn for a while, then I will seek out
an old woman.
A very old and wise woman that is very well versed in the black arts of voodoo.
She will be nicely rewarded
and I would have placed the most hellacious curse on anyone who has ever designed or brought this type of a surveillance scourge or similar upon mankind.
Yes I will.
Sorry to all the pin hole cam makers in advance.
Things need to balance out you know.

Regards,
G.

reply to post by zookey


Time to get the pineapple juice out and remove the fingerprints.

Or just don't be a perp and not have to worry about wiping your own prints off of stuff.

The article suggest using remote fingerprinting instead of a time-card puncher at places of employment. That's Orwellian, and it should be illegal. If 99% of employees voluntarily submit to remote fingerprinting, it forces the other 1% to wear gloves when they punch in and out the old fashioned way and it makes them suspects.

Under existing case law, police need a warrant or consent to fingerprint a suspect. If you leave your fingerprints on a glass in the presence of police, that constitutes consent. I would like to see that law strengthened with legislation, making it illegal to use surreptitiously obtained fingerprints in evidence against a defendant.

Better yet, it should be illegal for law enforcement agencies to even possess a device which can obtain fingerprints without consent. An exception might be made for detecting terrorist suspects at ports of entry to the country. If a fingerprint so obtained isn't already in the terrorist database, it should be illegal to record it. However, I doubt if that many terrorists have their fingerprints on record, so that would have little value.

Then there's the matter of "fruit of the poisoned tree". If a suspect is first identified by surreptitiosly obtained fingerprints, evidence subsequently developed because of that illegal search (of fingerprints) should also be excluded.

Until the law catches up, I guess it would be a good idea to buy stock in glove manufacturing companies.

Originally posted by jjkenobi
Or just don't be a perp and not have to worry about wiping your own prints off of stuff.

You dont have to be a criminal to get ground up in the "justice" system.

The fact that people still believe such nonsense as "only criminals need worry" is outrageous.

There's no tragedy when a criminal is caught. There are however limitless horrors when an innocent is.

Originally posted by jjkenobi
Or just don't be a perp and not have to worry about wiping your own prints off of stuff.

That sounds like my attitude about ten years ago, when I actually trusted things like governments or the legal system :p There are cases where people either get framed or set up for some crime that they didn't commit, or else, through sheer incompetence, well-meaning but stupid people will make mistakes and have punished people who in fact committed no crime. It's impossible to say how common this is, but I've read of cases where people were jailed for years, even decades, until finally they were able to prove their innocence.