All Air Passengers to Be Fingerprinted

According to the U.K.'s Telegraph, all international and domestic passengers leaving Terminal 5 of London's Heathrow Airport will soon be subjected to mandatory fingerprinting. The biometric check is also scheduled to be introduced at other London terminals.

"Dr. Gus Hosein, of the London School of Economics, [said,] '[t]here is no other country in the world that requires passengers travelling on internal flights to be fingerprinted. BAA says the fingerprint data will be destroyed, but the records of who has travelled within the country will not be, and it will provide a rich source of data for the police and intelligence agencies.

"'I grew up in a society where you only fingerprinted people if you suspected them of being criminals. . . . There will also be a suspicion that this is the thin end of the wedge, that we are being softened up by making fingerprinting seem normal in the run-up to things like ID cards.'

"Simon Davies, of campaign group Privacy International, [said,] ' . . . the experience in the US has shown that the information can only be used retrospectively, not in real time, as it takes so long to match a fingerprint to the one held on the database. I think once again we are seeing the introduction of technology whose benefits are illusory.'"

Related post here ("Big Brother Has Biometric Data on You").

UPDATE: A British company called ThruVision has developed a camera that can see through clothing to reveal what's in or under people's pockets from 80 feet away. It's called the T5000, and detects different materials based on the different signatures of Terahertz waves, or "T-rays," they emit. More at Gizmodo.