Sunday, July 24, 2005
Pressure Is Building
"NEW YORK (AP) - Pressure is building for greater use of video cameras to keep watch over the nation's cities - particularly in transportation systems and other spots vulnerable to terrorism - after the bombings in London.

The calls have come over the last few weeks as British investigators released surveillance footage of the bombers in the deadly July 7 attacks and then put out frames of suspects in Thursday's failed attacks.

'I do not think that cameras are the big mortal threat to civil liberties that people are painting them to be,' Washington, D.C., Mayor Anthony A. Williams said Friday"

(
more)

The Ears Are The Best Part
"EAR-shape analysis could be better than face recognition at automatically identifying people.
Mark Nixon, a biometrics expert at the University of Southampton, UK, has developed a technique to capture the shape of an ear and represent it in code. Unlike faces, ears do not change shape over time."


Oh great. Soon, we'll all be given government-issued haircuts to prevent identity fraud.
(more)

On The School Bus
"By January, a student's digitized fingerprint will be their boarding pass. As many as 75-thousand students will scan their index finger and the bus drivers will immediately know if that child is registered to ride that bus. The tracking system called Biometrics will let the district know when and where the students get on and off the school buses."

A classic strategy: indoctrinate them at an early age (when they have no rights) and turn their minds to gel for adulthood.
(more)

Once More For The Record: ID Cards Don't Work!
"Britain hasn't had an ID card since it scrapped its wartime card in 1952. Now the Government is introducing a scheme that will be voluntary at first but, by about 2012, almost certainly compulsory for everyone over the age of 16.

Each card will recognise a person's fingerprint, face and iris, while holding 'much other data, all stored on a huge central database', says Patrick Dunleavy, a politics professor at the London School of Economics. 'No scheme on this scale has been undertaken anywhere in the world.'"

(more)