Germany plans to fingerprint children, spy on personal messaging
uk.reuters.com
uk.reuters.com
I oppose that - because it is the first step to extend the surveillance state. Next to no one cares if refugees are forced to give up their fingerprints (except maybe the radical left), most people will actually silently approve of this, but who guarantees that in four years this won't be extended to every German?
And yes, there's precedence for politicians doing this - the Maut data, as well as the Vorratsdatenspeicherung (internet provider data), were once thought to be only for serious crimes but there are already plans to use the data also to fight "common lowlevel crime"...
We may trust our current governments but we cannot trust what future governments will do.
I'm a libertarian at heart, I've been very sympathetic towards refugees, however seeing lots of immigrants misbehave in my trips to the UK and Germany, I'm beginning to understand nationalism and why people have a periodic tendency towards populism (e.g. Trump, Brexit, etc).
The whole purpose of fingerprinting is crime fighting. Nothing else. There's no such thing as "immigration purposes". And when you're going into somebody's house, you obey their rules, otherwise you're free to go elsewhere.
"high rate of incidents"? Next to all recent terrorist attacks in the last years involved people who were born in Europe. According to Sascha Lobo and other media reports, all of them were known to police for being violent and dangerous, one of the London terrorists actually was on a TV show "the jihadist next door".
And the (real) problems, e.g. overcrowding refugee camps, could be solved by solidarity in Europe, but right now it's Italy and Greece picking up the brunt of the load, then Germany - and then, with a vast distance, every other country in Europe. Despite especially the Eastern European (Visegrad) countries having profited massively by financial solidarity from the rest of Europe (which is mainly DE, FR, UK).
> however seeing lots of immigrants misbehave in my trips to the UK and Germany, I'm beginning to understand nationalism and why people have a periodic tendency towards populism (e.g. Trump, Brexit, etc).
They have a tendency to nationalism/populism because populism does not work with evidence and facts but rather with emotions and propaganda.
> The whole purpose of fingerprinting is crime fighting. Nothing else.
Well, let's take the immigration discussion out of the view for one moment: for now, for example, protests are legal. But what prevents a future government from using fingerprint data or especially biometric photo data to prosecute people for protesting against government?
Nothing. And this is why such movements must be stopped before a future government turns against its citizens.
When I was an expat in Brazil, the first thing Policia Federal did was to take my fingerprints - no problem with that. I imagine the same happens with immigrants in US and other countries.
Also I can imagine how difficult registering people who run from was is, surely there are cases with no documents, documents lost, abusive gangs registering people several times and claiming "borrowed cousins" as children they get more money for etc.
Because demanding fingerprints from refugees but not Germans prejudices against refugees by branding them all as potential future criminals.
> Also I can imagine how difficult registering people who run from was is, surely there are cases with no documents, documents lost, abusive gangs registering people several times and claiming "borrowed cousins" as children they get more money for etc.
These are a negligible amount of cases. And especially not worth to destroy the right to privacy of the other 99.9999% of the population.
there is absolutely no way that mandatory government spyware on phones will guarantee effectiveness, though -- the bataclan attackers for instance used ordinary sms to coordinate[3]. besides that, the potential for abuse is unfathomable.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/16/boy-12-attempted-...
[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/18/german-train-axe-...
[3] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/11/paris_terrori...
This is a classic, and irrational, disproportionate response.
Besides, is there any evidence that monitoring 100% of message traffic will reduce terrorist attacks? Are terrorists really so dumb they're going to plan their attacks via a monitored channel? Do governments really have any problem catching and convicting criminals?
Actually yes! The Paris attack was coordinated via sms. I know other attacks have been coordinated via monitored channels.
The real problem is that even with all this monitoring, nothing is being done to stop terrorist attacks. Turns out, stopping terrorist attacks was never the point in the first place, who woulda though!?!
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/18/signs-point-to-unencrypt...
*edit: It's probably not fair to say "nothing" is being done. But we're definitely putting our efforts into the wrong direction, and I stand by the statement that the point is not to stop the attacks.
Coordinated, yes, but I seriously doubt they texted their intentions and purpose.
the new door entry system at the current school (I don't know the vendor yet) is using biometrics "let us know if you have a problem with this"
1.28M (2015) UK school children have given biometrics:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/p...