Sadly fingerprint errors, are not limited to the UK.

It has now been reported that the Los Angeles Police Department have made several major errors relating to their finger print examination.

Its know that innocent people have been arrested based on “shoddy work”, by the finger print analyst.  The exact number of arrest has not been released yet, but at two people where charged before the errors were found.

So far one fingerprint expert has been fired, and three suspended as a result of the errors.

Now the LAPD are trying to show that the mistakes are very limited, and perhaps the most obviously bad errors are limited, but what about the ones that harder to spot, that are just “human error” rather than incredibly bad police work?

With the LAPD and Scottish fingerprint analysts making such massive errors that innocent people were arrested and even sent to prison, is it conceivable that two fingerprint departments, with no relation to each other, and 12,000 miles apart, are the only two departments in the world with these issues? Or is it more likely that every department in between has had some error, but it has just not been detected?

Westminster County Council has requested that staff provide fingerprints, for the purposes of tracking their staff ‘clocking on and off’.

The use of fingerprints by the council can be seen as a modern solution of the age old problem of monitoring staff arriving and leaving work.

With the traditional punch cards anyone could have logged in and out, the same could be said with passwords or identity tokens, which can be passed between people. Fingerprints are unique and cannot (allegedly) be transferred between people.

While the government and councillor alike insist there is nothing wrong with fingerprinting staff, they also stated that DNA would only be taken from the guilty, that ANPR would be targeted at terrorists, and that surveillance powers would only be used against criminals, and that our data would be secure.  It should also be noted that the fingerprint reading technology can be defeated

Perhaps the biggest concern is that fingerprinting workers in an office is just part of the “softening up process”, where we as a society, are monitored and tracked every stop of the way.

2 million children have had their fingerprints taken by schools, many without consent. Currently the government states that these prints would never leave the school databases. As the government has previously asked for children under 11 to provide fingerprints, why would the government just give up all of this data? What is to stop them changing the law so that they can keep these 2 million records? Even more concerning is that as these children move into adulthood they will be accustomed to being tracked and monitored, and will not object to the ever growing databases of  CCTV, Fingerprints, and DNA.

So when the unions object to workers having to provide fingerprints, perhaps they are not doing it out of short term political gain (a charge often levied at the unions) but out of long term concern for society.

Tags: ANPR, CCTV, Data Loss, DNA, Law

With fingerprint scanners increasingly in use, from schools to offices, to passports and border controls. How good are these things?

Do they really work?

Well, if these videos are anything to go by, the answers are “not very” and “no”

How to defeat fingerprint readers (full video on creating false fingerprints)

Below are artilces on the issue of fingerprinting children in School

• First School to introduce Fingerprinting
• Leave Them Kids Alone
• BBC
• Privacy International

Tags: privacy

In 2006 the primary school, Primose Hill (North London) was found to be fingerprinting children as young as five, without their parents consent.

Article

On 24^th April 2006 the Association of Chief Police Offices (ACPO) produced a memo in relation to the retention of DNA and similar records.

ACPO recognized that people would be requesting that their DNA, fingerprint and PNC records destroyed if they were innocent of any crime; ACPO stated that “There is an increase in the number of requests being made to Chief Constables for the removal of DNA, fingerprints and PNC. This has been brought about by changes to PACE and a recent decision made in the Royal Courts of Justice by the Information Tribunal affecting the retention of criminal conviction history on PNC” and added Chief Constable are able to request the deletion of fingerprint, PNC, and DNA records of data they “own”, i.e data which their force processed.

ACPO even went as far as to define the occasions when DNA and fingerprints would be removed. The memo stated that:

Exceptional cases will, by definition, be rare. They might include cases where the original arrest or sampling was found to be unlawful. Additionally, where it is established beyond doubt that no offence existed, that might, having regard to all the circumstances, be viewed as an exceptional circumstance. For example where a dead body is found in a multi-occupancy dwelling and the cause of death is not immediately obvious. All the occupants are arrested on suspicion of murder pending the outcome of a post mortem. All arrested persons are detained at the local police station and samples taken. It later transpires that the deceased person died of natural causes. No offence therefore exists, and all persons are released from custody.

Tags: DNA, Law

Following a call for evidence, by the House of Lords, for their investigation and report entitled “The Impact of Surveillance and Data Collection upon the Privacy of Citizens and their Relationship with the State” several different bodies and individuals provided their expertise, including GeneWatch, the Royal Engineering Academy, and ARCH. On 8^th July 2007 Richard Thomas of the ICO submitted a report to House of Lords on the issue. The full report is available here.

Highlights from the report include:

• The commissioner believes that the risks of excessive surveillance are with us today.
• The risks to individuals [privacy]….. are evident and positive action is required to ensure that these risks do not manifest themselves and that unwarranted harm does not occur.
• The Commissioner proposes that the Committee gives particular consideration to the following measures:

1. • Mandatory privacy impact assessments by government departments.
2. • Requirements to have codes of practice in place for pro active information sharing in the public sector.
3. • Proper consultation with the Commissioner before significant new developments.
4. • Increased audit and inspection powers for the Commissioner.
5. • Effective penalties for serious disregard for the requirements of the data protection principles.

Tags: data protection, Evidence, ICO, privacy

As part of the House of Lords select committee investigation into privacy, entitled “The Impact of Surveillance and Data Collection upon the Privacy of Citizens and their Relationship with the State” numerous bodies and individuals were asked to report on their areas of expertise. One of these was the British Computing Society – BCS.

Their official report, submitted in 2007, made several statements and went into a degree of detail about the use of technology in the

“ Whilst BCS supports the need for efficient public services which fully utilise the technology available, and understands the concerns which lead to the increase in surveillance measures, it is extremely perturbed about the increasing (although not deliberate) power of the state vis-à-vis the citizen as surveillance measures proliferate and data collection increases.”

This is not the only report to the House of Lords highlighting the problems with the current surveillance society, the GeneWatch report had similar criticisms,

BCS Report

Tags: privacy

On 6th May 2004 US Citizen Brandon Mayfield  was arrested by the FBI as the primary suspect responsible for the the Madrid Bombings. The detention was based on a single, imperfect finger print, which the FBI did not see the original of, despite being given the opportunity by the Spanish police. Brandon was released on 21st May 2004, two days after the Spanish police had identified the correct suspect, Ouhane Daoud.

On the 13th March 2004 when the FBI first searched their database “AFIS” - Automatic Fingerprint Identification Search”, the result was negative, and they asked for a new, better quality image, which they received on the following day, on 14th March.

On 15th March 2004, 20 “matches” were found during the search - 20 were found as the search was programmed to limit it do 20 - i.e it could/would have many more, if it had not been limited to 20 people.

Brandon Mayfield was ranked number 4 on the search. However details of the 20 people identified in the search were extracted and background checks made. Brandon Mayfield has the following Bio:

American citizen born in Oregon and reared in Kansas. He lives with his wife and three children in Aloha, Oregon, a suburb of Portland. Mayfield was 38 years old, a former Army officer with an honorable discharge, and a practicing Oregon lawyer. However his faith is listed as Muslim.

On April 13, 2004, the Spanish National Police provided a written report to the FBI concluding that Mayfield’s fingerprints did no match the scene of crime.

The FBI continued to investigate Brandon Mayfield, including bugging his house, etc, then on 6th May 2004 Bradon was eventually arrested, he was put in solitary confinement, his family told the evidence was “100%” and leaks to the press about the guilt of Brandon were made.

On 19th May 2004 the Spanish Police correctly identified who the fingerprint belonged to, an Algerian called -Ouhane Daoud.However the FBI continued to detain Brandon until the 21st - when the story made the news. Even then Brandon was still placed under home arrest until 24th May, when the FBI finally released him.

This case, along with the case of David Asbury, shows how large amounts of data, and fingerprints in particular, can and are misused.

Links:

The Register

FBI Statement

US Court Report

Tags: Fingerprint, fingerprints, Terrorism

In June 2007 Lord Carlile of Berriew, Q.C. produced a report entitled” REPORT ON THE OPERATION IN

2006 OF THE TERRORISM ACT 2000″ in this he made several comments about the Terrorism Act 2000, one of the more interesting comments is made on page 73 of the report, it states “significant amendment introduced by ATCSA2001 allowed authorisation for the obtaining from a detained person of fingerprints, restricted to cases of refusal of identity or where there are reasonable grounds to doubt the claimed identity. Used fairly, this is a proportional and reasonable provision, and should work adequately.Three years ago I recommended that statistics should be kept by the Home Office of the use of this power. Frustratingly, I have yet to be provided with them: they should now be made available.”

Full Report

Tags: fingerprints, Identity, Terrorism