US Government demands direct police access to European biometric data [pdf]

One topic is around the dependability and practicality of such metrics as authenticators. The other topic is around surveillance and anonymity. The overlap is in the question of whether we have control over whether we are being authenticated or not. When used in a transactional system, we need to couple our authenticated identity with some positive action to give consent, i.e. that we want the transaction to occur and we accept the responsibilities of being one party to the transaction. In a surveillance system, we are being identified and our movements or actions attributed to us whether we want to or not.

Both topics have a potential for false positives and false negatives. Can someone "steal" my identity by impersonating me and causing transactions or other activities to be attributed to me without my knowledge? Or can someone through violence or coercion cause me to participate in these transactions or other activities against my will? Does the introduction of the authentication system reduce the risks or make them worse?

To what degree can we live our lives without displaying our identity to the public at large and/or while being able to assume some of our movements or activities can be kept confidential? We can choose whether to have our names or ID numbers emblazoned on our clothes. We can choose how often to present other non-biological identifiers like payment cards or mobile phones. It is much less practical to conceal our externally visible biometrics. The databases combining our biometrics and other identifiers continually shift the balance here, as it becomes ever easier to tie different observations together without our consent.

To be honest, I am not even sure whether I should care about the biometrics access being discussed in the original post. Generally, international travelers are already exposing their identities and movements not just at border controls but also via commercial bookings and interactions throughout their travel. I think I am more disgusted by the commercial brokers trying to create total information awareness of consumers than I am of governments monitoring border travel. The commercial brokers are trying to create a much finer-grained record of activities for everybody.

Here, everyone left to right were saying, this will never happen.

The people who said that are all retired wealthy, their parties still exist, let us hold them accountable.

They always say they will get something in exchange, but it is all lies, the moment you are bargaining for something in exchange, youve already lost.

Keep in mind, never give anything to the EU either, they cannot be trusted blindly either, theyre just somewhat more accountable. If they would be the worlds superpower, I am not sure how benevolent they would be.

Everywhere on earth, the regular citizens have the same domestic nuissance, snoopi governments, all parties somehow collecting big data as if it were their business model.

Anyone who knows a lawyer, a govt tax agency worker and such will know, the data tue govt has will never be used for good, it will even be twisted in their favor.

Left or right does not matter, probably never did, if we had democracies, theycall such things bipartisan, the total left or right wing goverments had leaders like franco, pinochet, mao, stalin and such.

Anarchists keep saying the biggest atrocities were always from governments, not sure what to say about that, governmnents are always humans as well.

There is some issue at hand with power. Even in Switzerland, with its "direct democracy", the police state is quite invasive, discretly in the background.

Maybe human civilization is simply still in its infancy regarding governing the population.

100 years ago we had ww1, bit more back, feudalism etc.

We are talking about a sub-set of security instruments and preventions, one of the many available, are we sure that an armed conflict - or just threat - would worth the trouble?