England's Heathrow airport will begin [a href="vny!://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/07/nheathrow107.xml"]fingerprinting passengers on its domestic flights[/a] later this month. Airport executives claim that the data will be stored for no longer than 24 hours, and will not be shared with law enforcement.
All four million domestic passengers who will pass through Terminal 5 annually after it opens on March 27 will have four fingerprints taken, as well as being photographed, when they check in. To ensure the passenger boarding the aircraft is the same person, the fingerprinting process will be repeated just before they board the aircraft and the photograph will be compared with their face.
Dr Gus Hosein, of the London School of Economics, an expert on the impact on technology on civil liberties, is one of the scheme's strongest critics. He said: "There is no other country in the world that requires passengers travelling on internal flights to be fingerprinted. BAA says the fingerprint data will be destroyed, but the records of who has travelled within the country will not be, and it will provide a rich source of data for the police and intelligence agencies."
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They're just trying to get the citizens used to these kinds of abuses so that when they do start cross-checking and retaining data indefinitely nobody will be able to tell the difference, or care. It's what they did with Traffic cameras. First it was just about license plate data for the congestion charge, and we were all assured that it wouldn't capture images of faces or be used by the police ... Fast Forward a year or two, and faces are captured and the police have full unfettered access - to fight terrorism and organised crime ... and petty crime ... and political dissenters ...
And Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.
