How biometric systems are sold to schools

 

1. Which the police call by its real name - 'fingerprint scanning'.
    
    
   
2. School fingerprint scanning has been practised for more than five years. The first school implementation we are aware of was in 1999. "[Mitch] Johns [president of Altoona, Pa.-based Food Service Solutions] introduced the first fingerprint payment system in 1999 "
    
    
   
3. Paragraph one reads "Finger images are scanned and stored on the computer network". In paragraph two this is denied: "...the finger image is discarded".
    
    
   
4. EVERYTHING that is stored on a computer is stored as a number. Whether it's a fingerprint image, biometric template, scan of the Mona Lisa, movie on DVD or a Word document. It is simply nonsense to claim otherwise.
    
    
   
5. Since a fingerprint (and the template derived from it) cannot EVER be changed, unlike a PIN number, this encryption would have to be guaranteed for a child's entire lifetime - in practice it's likely to be broken within 10 years, with the distinct possibility that immensely powerful Quantum computing will become a reality by the time today's children are in their thirties. In February 2007, One U.S. company demonstrated a prototype quantum computer. Today's military security is tomorrow's childsplay - The Nazis' wartime state-of-the-art Enigma code can be broken with ease on today's home PCs. And even the 1976 state-of-the-art 64-bit Data Encryption Standard (DES), developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US, can now be cracked on today's supercomputers.
    
    
   
6. In the UK, the Information Commissioner recommends that when biometric data is removed from a school system this should be done by an professional data cleansing company. Of course, this would not only apply to the fingerprint template, but to any full fingerprint image used to generate that template. With some systems these full images may be generated each time a child touches a scanner. It is not sufficient to simply delete these using conventional means, as there may be ways to recover them. For peace of mind, they must be professionally wiped.
    
    
   
7. According to the U.S. government's official National Science & Technology Council, you CAN reconstruct a fingerprint image from a fingerprint template.
    
    
   
8. But it will be accessible to technicians, librarians, and countless unspecified others. If the data was ever copied, this might not even be discovered until years later when bank accounts were raided or other serious identity theft took place.
    
    
   
9. The police, security services, and governments use fingerprint templates to track and identify criminals.
    
    
   
10. Nowadays, messy ink pads and fingerprint images are redundant - it is fingerprint templates, as stored on this system, that are important. Soon they will be used in critical applications such as banks, passport offices, etc. Hence it is vital to protect them.
     
     
    
11. If the system is as 'exciting' as claimed, with real benefits for children, why aren't parents offered the chance to opt IN? Not a single school does this. Lack of consent certainly doesn't mean implied consent.
     
     
    
12. The Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy reports that people with colds leave the rhinovirus on surfaces they touch 35 percent of the time. Uninfected people pick up the virus on their fingertips 47 percent of the time, even 18 hours after the surface was contaminated. Preliminary, as yet unpublished research seen by LTKA suggests that there may be even more of a problem with some dangerous, contagious viruses that are not removed from surfaces cleaned in the recommended way.
     
     
    
13. A number of schools have denied this, some have even scrapped systems claiming they were too slow..
     
     
    

Read the facts about biometrics in schools