Privacy Digest

Mass Travel Brings New Risks, Says Blair - March 2007: "UK Prime Minister Tony Blair hosted a seminar Wednesday with leading biometric and immigration experts as the government published a new strategy for securing the UK's borders.

Under the plans, all foreign visitors from outside the European Union will be required to give a biometric sample before they arrive at UK shores, or upon arrival.

[...]

The Prime Minister said biometric technology was an integral aspect for securing Britain's borders. 'We have to think beyond the idea of national borders as a line on the map. Even guards every 50 yards around our borders would not tackle false identities,' Blair explained. 'Once people are here, ID cards are the only way of tracking them inside the UK.'

'The Prime Minister persists in his blind faith that 'biometrics' will solve a whole host of problems, much as he does with ID cards,' says Philip Booth, National Coordinator of NO2ID. Booth says all Blair's program will do is make traveling more a hassle, which could have a negative affect on tourism and education, as well as create more bureaucracy. 'Fingerprinting someone who lands on our shores for the first time will achieve precisely nothing, and trying to match the fingerprints of an unknown to the records of the over 90 million per year who pass through our borders is a technical impossibility.'"