EU and british government to fingerprint kids
I realise I’ve been a bit slow on reporting on this but here goes anyway. Early in March, The Register reported that the government apparently plans to take the fingerprints of children as young as 11 for biometric passports:
Home Office minister Liam Byrne told ITV1 television’s The Sunday Edition that the Identity and Passport Service wanted to fingerprint all children over the age of 11 and keep their particulars on a database.
The reason, he said, is because it is currently possible get a 10 year passport without biometrics while a child and still be carrying it validly at age 17, the age at which a biometric passport would be issued to someone who applied afresh for their travel permit.
According to this article, the European Union has already agreed to fingerprint children as young as 12:
A Home Office spokesman said it is bound by the rules of the European Schengen agreement, which Britain isn’t signed up to, but has vowed to mirror, to introduce biometric fingerprints to British passports by 2009.
The spokesman said the Europeans hadn’t decided on a minimum age for demanding that someone proffer their biometrics at border control.
However, the European Council pretty much already agreed last summer that children as young as 12 would be stored on Europe’s fingerprint database.