Friday, October 29, 2010
(photo: William Tremblay, U.S. Army)
In Afghanistan, the American military is using handheld high-tech devices to scan the irises and record the fingerprints of Afghans to store in a database that allows soldiers to identify and capture insurgents.
The U.S. Army reportedly has gathered information on 800,000 people, using small portable equipment that contains a camera to scan eyes and an electronic pad to take fingerprints.
Afghanistan’s government has been getting into biometric ID gathering as well, storing info on 250,000 people so far. But American officials want President Hamid Karzai to get behind a more aggressive effort to collect biometric ID data on every Afghan citizen age 16 and up.
There is no linkage between the two databases, which limits the effectiveness of the operation. Some critics of the Karzai government worry about the risk of the biometric data being used for the wrong purposes.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
US Army Amasses Biometric Data in Afghanistan (by Jon Boone, Guardian)
Army Reveals Afghan Biometric ID Plan; Millions Scanned, Carded by May (by Noah Shachtman, Wired)
Comments