Big Brother is a metaphor

international | rights, freedoms and repression | opinion/analysis

Wednesday February 23, 2005 01:32

by Rasta4i's

New Technologies - Biometrics

The terms "Biometrics" and "Biometry" have been used since early in the 20th century to refer to the field of development of statistical and mathematical methods connected to data analysis problems in the biological sciences.

Nowadays, biometrics is the measurement of an individual's unique physical characteristics, such as face and voice patterns, signature analysis, iris scans, hand geometry and the most common, fingerprints.

There are a lot of potential uses for such technology. It helps law enforcement officials identify and discourage terrorists and criminals and someday you may be able to use a simple fingerprint to pay for your Big Mac at McDonald’s or to make a bank transaction at an ATM equipped with a signature-verification pad.

Using biometrics with information stored in databases that can be accessed anywhere in the country may lead to abuses in personal freedoms and privacy. Governments claim that they are under an international obligation to create national databases of fingerprints and face scans but we will soon see nations with appalling human rights records generating massive databases and then requiring our own fingerprints and face-scans as we travel. Legislation passed after the September 2001 attacks required foreign countries to create biometric-enabled passports. The US required that all passports issued after 26 October 2004 were to have a biometric identifier i.e. facial characteristic.

Big Brother is a metaphor that covers the regions of governmental science, technology, the global monitoring intelligence community such as the GPS (Global Positioning Satellites) and many other similar entities that will lead humanity into a One World Government where every human being will be marked, tracked and monitored. ()

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