freedom: it just put your ass in a biometric database
Posted on | August 25, 2010 | No Comments
I don’t know if I’ve ever loved a news story the way that I love this one from USA Today. See, the U.S. military needs to identify insurgents in Afghanistan, so it’s using retina scanners and fingerprint scanners to build a database encompassing “all Afghan males of fighting age.” Then they lift fingerprints from a bomb, see, or check the retinas of someone they’ve detained as a bad guy, and bam: positive identification of a terrorizer! Thousands of Afghans are scanned into the database every month.
So how many insurgents have been caught with this technology, so far? Click through to the story if you need to, but I bet you already know the answer. The U.S. military is scanning the fingerprints and retinas of every male of fighting age who comes to U.S. or ANA-staffed checkpoints and submits to fingerprint and retina scans. Just like the Taliban totally does all the time, is how that one is apparently supposed to work.
But it gets so much more wonderfully betterer, because of the freedomness:
Soldiers are encouraged to keep a friendly attitude while scanning subjects.
“We just try to be polite and tell them we are trying to separate the good guys from the bad guys,” Lt. Scott Browne says while scanning subjects at the Freedom Gate, a bustling border entry point in the town of Wesh.
Freedom Gate: It’s where you come to be scanned into the database as a subject.
“Soldiers are encouraged to keep a friendly attitude while scanning subjects.” I believe that kind of sentence is sometimes called an “epitaph.”
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