Fingerprinting and Citizen's Freedom

It was reported that Taiwan government is planning to add individual citizen's fingerprint on the new National ID card. People concern with human rights would immediate argue the validity and necessity of this policy because a country is not a free country when its citizens are regarded as criminals without proving any crime has been committed.

In the recent history, we member that during Hitler was in power, he ordered to keep fingerprints of all prisoners and Jews. More recently, it was President G.W. Bush ordered to take every foreigner who visits US should have his/her fingerprint taken in 2001. Bush did that as a measure to identify foreign “terrorists”.

Then there was a call for fingerprinting all citizens in EU. That was debated vigorously and was not implemented. During the hearing in Europe, there was an exchange of Q&A:
[Question: Are you personally happy with compulsory fingerprints for all EU citizens via a biometric passport?
Josep Borrell: As you are no doubt aware, this is a requirement imposed by the US authorities. The Council has fallen into line with them, whereas our Parliamentary Committee would have preferred a different approach.]

There were not many oppositions to this measure in Taiwan from both human rights organizations and also newspapers until about 10 days ago, when Ms. Annette Lu, Vice President of ROC, was quoted to say the fingerprinting is not right and is unconstitutional. More attention were paid to this issue by newspapers after Ms Lu spoke at the “International Symposium on Human Rights” held on May 18, 2005. In her welcome speech she commented on this subject by saying:

“Recently, when the government began to consider the necessity of incorporating universal fingerprinting into the new ID system, many in society were worried that such a policy would infringe upon fundamental human rights. The Advisory Council conducted a series of hearings immediately and reported to the president. In that report we reminded the government of the potential problems of incorporating fingerprinting into the new national ID system. Although Taiwan is not a member of the United Nations, the Advisory Council reached the conclusion that we should encourage the government to take steps to enter into the regime of the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court.”

More discussion on this subject had been made by Bruce Schneier on “Newsday”, January 14, 2004:

According to the Bush administration, the measures are designed to combat terrorism. As a security expert, it's hard for me to see how. The 9/11 terrorists would not have been deterred by this system; many of them entered the country legally on valid passports and visas. We have a 5,500-mile long border with Canada and another 2,000-mile long border with Mexico currently uncovered by the program. An estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people enter the country illegally each year from Mexico. Two million to 3 million people enter the country legally each year and overstay their visas. Capturing the biometric information of everyone entering the country doesn't make us safer.

And even if we could completely seal our borders, fingerprinting everyone still wouldn't keep terrorists out. It's not like we can identify terrorists in advance. The border guards can't say "this fingerprint is safe; it's not in our database" because there is no fingerprint database for suspected terrorists.

Even more dangerous is the precedent this program sets. Today the program affects only foreign visitors with visas. The next logical step is to fingerprint all visitors to the United States and then everybody, including U.S. citizens.

Retaliation is another worry. Brazil is now fingerprinting Americans who visit that country, and other countries are expected to follow suit. All over the world, totalitarian governments will use our fingerprinting regime to justify fingerprinting Americans who enter their countries. This means that your prints are going to end up on file with every tin-pot dictator from Sierra Leone to Uzbekistan. And Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge has already pledged to share security information with other countries.

Security is a trade-off. When deciding whether to implement a security measure, we must balance the costs against the benefits. Large-scale fingerprinting is something that doesn't add much to our security against terrorism and costs an enormous amount of money that could be better spent elsewhere. Allocating the funds on compiling, sharing and enforcing the terrorist watch list would be a far better security investment. As a security consumer, I'm getting swindled.

America's security comes from our freedoms. For more than two centuries, we have maintained a delicate balance between freedom and the opportunity for crime. We deliberately put laws in place that hamper police investigations because we know we are more secure because of them. We know that laws regulating wiretapping, search and seizure, and interrogation make us all safer, even if they make it harder to convict criminals.

The U.S. system of government has a basic unwritten rule: The government should be granted only limited power, and for limited purposes, because of the certainty that government power will be abused. We've already seen the Patriot Act powers granted to the government to combat terrorism directed against common crimes. Allowing the government to create the infrastructure to collect biometrics information on everyone it can is not a power we should grant the government lightly. It's something we would have expected in former East Germany, Iraq or the Soviet Union. In all of these countries, greater government control meant less security for citizens, and the results in the United States will be no different. It's bad civic hygiene to build an infrastructure that can be used to facilitate a police state.
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The government on Taiwan did not use the anti-Terrorist as the reason of requiring fingerprinting all citizens. It said that fingerprinting will reduce the crime. However, if one look closely to the details of the statistics of crimes, you will quickly find out that:

(1) The most frequent crime is stealing/theft. It consists of about 60% of the total crimes. More interesting fact is that about 62% of these cases was committed by the repeated criminals.
(2) Fingerprint is not the only convincing evidence used by the court. Clever criminals and careful criminals will avoid leaving fingerprint at the crime scene. The police could find fingerprints left by other innocent people.
(3) Fingerprinting system's error can cost lots of money, effort and time for legal solution.
(4) Safety statistics does not support the claim that number of crime will reduce by fingerprinting people related with the cases.

So, what is the advantage of that elaborating and costly system? The only advantage is that it provides a convenient tool for police force to arrest people. But more important issue is that fingerprinting citizens is really violate the fundamental human rights of citizens.