Everyone a suspect with new fingerprint law

Posted on 8 Apr 2009 at 12:15

Police will soon have access to all British citizens' fingerprint data, making everyone a suspect in a criminal investigation. The Home Office told Shopper that it will keep everyone's fingerprint data in a database that will be used "in the interests of national security or the prevention and detection of crime".

The ability to track everyone's fingerprints, not just those people that have been previously fingerprinted by the Police, will come in 2012 when new UK passports will hold fingerprint data in a drive to combat identity theft.

This extra biometric data will be held in the existing passport database, which currently stores details on 47 million people's passports. Police will have access to this data when investing crimes, and be able to compare fingerprints collected at a scene to those stored in the passport database.

The Home Office has played down the security risk of holding this information.

"In response to any attempt of hacking attacks, we have multiple defences in layer and we can detect attacks quickly," said a Home Office spokesman. "Even if someone were partially successful, they cannot gain access to do damage."

We were also assured that the passport databases will not hold sensitive personal data such as medical history, criminal records or pension information.

Author: Dawinderpal Sahota

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