It appears that the EU is planning to tighten its borders further with new security proposals which civil liberties groups believe is “a bridge too far”, and represent a significant advance in the surveillance society. Proposed new measures will involve children as young as 6 having their fingerprints checked.

“By 2019 all travellers, including children, will be required to enter a closed booth on their own, where their biometric details, stored digitally on microchips in passports, will be checked against their real fingerprints.”

Currently new British passports contain a digital record of an individual’s facial characteristics but by the end of 2009 “e-passports” will also contain digitally stored fingerprints.

When I read articles like this one that raise privacy and civil liberty concerns, I do tend to ask myself how I actually feel about it, and I have to admit that I struggle to get worked up about such things, including the big debate about identity cards in the UK. It always seems to me that if you have nothing to hide, surely anything that increases security has to be a good thing, certainly if it creates a faster process when it comes to traveling. I’m even chilled out when it comes to the spread of CCTV, although I must check out an old episode of The Bill to see how they actually managed to solve crime without it!

I did however listen to a very interesting interview on the idea of everybody’s DNA being held on a central database, which did raise some real concerns that I agreed with. It was basically how easy it would be to plant an innocent person’s DNA at the scene of a crime, since all our DNA is freely available to anyone who knows us via hair sample, drinking classes etc.

Back to travel, there is no mention in the article I read of ‘iris recognition’. When Chris last travelled to the UK he volunteered to sign up for this as it was a brilliant fast track option to avoid the passport check queues. I’m sure he will comment further on this, including the little booth.

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