And leave the societal aspects others

298 Biometrics: Privacy Versus Nonrepudiation

validity of fingerprint (or any other biometric) evidence that appears to place their client at the scene of a crime. Hardly ever is the question asked whether the fingerprint found could have been placed at the scene in order to incriminate a third party and to terminate any further investigation of other suspects.

The false reasoning that tries to equate security with identification goes even further and exploits every civilized person’s strong aversion to terror-ism. The often-repeated argument is, If we could identify every person entering an airport or even merely driving by a building, then we could pre-vent future airplane-related terrorist attacks and future vengeful bombings of government buildings. This argument is logically false for a very simple reason: Any disciplined clandestine organization planning to perpetrate a terrorist attack selects as perpetrators individuals who are unknown to the security services of the targeted nations. As a result, one cannot identify individuals who are not on any watch list or in any other database.

Even in the case of routine criminality, first-time offenders are by defini-tion not in anybody’s database of wanted persons because they are first-time offenders. Unless the world degenerates to the point depicted in the movie Minority Report (where innocent individuals are arrested for a crime they have not yet committed but which it is predicted they will commit if not arrested) or to the point where citizens are arrested “for good measure” by oppressive regimes that fear any lack of overt subservience, today’s informa-tion technology has no means of detecting malicious intent in otherwise law-abiding citizens.

Engineers and scientists tend to prefer to focus on the strictly technical aspects of their fields, biometrics in this case, and to leave the societal aspects to others. This may be both unwise and inadvisable: Those unnamed others will likely have their own agendas, and we (and our children) will end up having to live with the consequences of far-reaching decisions by such unnamed others that get enshrined into law and, hence, into the real-ity of the future. Sooner or later we will be dust, but our children and their children deserve a livable society and not an Orwellian one.

Law and order is all well and good and essential, if we think of it in terms of preventing fraud, arson, murder, and mayhem. But we are all humans, not automatons. Lives there a child who has never lied, never stricken someone in anger, or never stolen another child’s toy? Lives there an adult who has never done a single thing that would have landed him or her in jail if caught (e.g., exceeding the posted speed limit by more than 20 mph, a fel-ony in the United States and in other countries for which one can be jailed)? Do we really want to empower immature 20-year-old policemen with the authority and the means to identify, arrest, and incarcerate any person in their country, based on a know-all law enforcement apparatus that embod-ies the Panopticon concept and is made possible with biometric identifica-tion? Recall Atlas Shrugged where Ayn Rand shows how a government that can criminalize everything or, equivalently, that knows everyone’s every transgression since birth and can identify everyone is omnipotent because it can selectively and legally jail anyone it feels like, technically in the name of law and order.