Here's an article on biometrics and their "threat" to civil liberties. It quotes Dick Armey as being offended by the use of face scanning at Superbowl XXXV in Tampa:

"They basically intruded on the privacy of everybody who went to that game," said Armey. "My right to ambulate in a public setting should not be compromised."

I've never thought Armey was the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but you'd think he could understand the concept of expectation of privacy. I would also expect him to realize that living is a civil liberty that is now threatened by dangerous people who live in our midst, and that most of us put "privacy" a little further down the scale that that.

Here's another quote:

"There's something about the public space that everyone shares and that you can't withdraw from," Electronic Privacy Information Center Policy Fellow Mihir Kshirsagar said. "If my 7-11 chooses to use a face recognition scanner, I can go to another store, but I don't have that choice on a public street."

"There's something about ourselves that is being captured," Kshirsagar added. "This biometric identification will be linked to some kind of database. All of a sudden you have a pretty intrusive look into somebody's life."

"The problem, along with most other technologies that are being introduced right now, is that the technology is developing at the speed of light but the law that protects us is still in the Stone Age," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty Program. "We're not luddites at the ACLU. We think that there are uses of technology that enhance liberty. Unfortunately, until we develop some baseline privacy protections, we're going to find ourselves opposing most uses of biometrics."

The first guy sounds like those primitives who think that taking photographs steals one's soul.


Personally, I think that privacy, as it is promoted today is not, and never has been, a right in the way that freedom of speech and religion are. Privacy is what you get in your bedroom, not in airports and stadia. I've never understood where this idea that we have a right to be anonymous came from. It verges on saying that we have the right to commit crimes, or pose as someone we're not, and not get caught.


Technology is nothing more than a means of extending the ability of humans, in this case face recognition equipment enhances the ability of officials to screen crowds for known criminals, something that guards and screeners are allowed to do already. And computers are, or will be, less likely than airport screeners to stop nuns and grandmothers and confiscate their fingernail clippers.


There are certainly uses of information about us which should be limited or outlawed, but looking at our faces shouldn't be one of them.