Get ready for King Herod - we're counting the kids

Houston Chronicle Online
Dec 29th 2006 Biometric Intelligence & Identification.

The human iris has a unique pattern of flecks, colours and spots that can provide 235 identifying characteristics that are unchanging after the age of 1 and providing a claimed 1 in 200 million match.

Dubai uses these easily phographed, encoded/decoded and read personal identitifiers to keep track of Asian labourers entering and leaving the country, The US Marines keeps track of the poor bastards who call Fallujah home the same way.

Now Galveston on the sunny coast of the Gulf of Mexico is intending to keep track of missing children and wandering Alzheimer patients using the same remarkable technology.Pic shows Maj. Ray Tuttoilmondo, of the Galveston County Sheriff's Department in charge - I wouldn't put HIM in charge of my child.

The Galveston County Sheriff's Department is the first sheriff's department in Texas and (incredibly) the 47th nationwide to join the Children's Identification Database, or CHILD Project.

Robert Melley, vice president and CEO of Biometric Intelligence & Identification leads a campaign to image the irises of 5 million children into a nationwide database over the next few years. "We have 1,800 sheriff's departments representing 46 states who have committed to participating," he claimed last week. 26 States are fully signed up so far in 18 months.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimates that, on average, more than 2,000 children are reported missing every day across the US.

In Galveston the $35,000 cost of two imaging machines would come from private donations.

Eventually, it is intended to buy a separate system for the county jail to use during bookings. The system would prevent the wrong prisoner from being released, which is in use in Massachusetts and Las Vegas curently.

Quite how a child makes an informed decision to be included on the database or can express a preference not to be included is left hanging.


Here are some sites to explore and review the way technology is being used to document, watch, record and ultimately control children.... and get them ready for a lifetime of it.

http://www.leavethemkidsalone.com/ updated and greatly expanded - required reading for ALL parents.
http://www.arch-ed.org/
www.No2ID.net
http://www.michaelpbyron.com/ (Author of Infinity's Rainbow: The Politics of Energy, Climate and Globalization. - ) also see his blog http://myblog.michaelpbyron.com

See also Lord Patel
Sunday, October 29
Biometric control of schoolkids starts up in Scottish Schools
Wednesday, October 4
The UK Department for Education and Skills builds Paedophile's database

Now watch the demonstration ...




For a lengthy, detailed and authoritative discussion of biometrics read the position paper of the Electronics Frontier Foundation here on the legal / ethical / moral / socvial aspecys of sing biometric data...."Deploying biometric systems without sufficient attention to their dangers makes them likely to be used in a way dangerous to civil liberties."