Already sensitive and integrity breaching data is being covertly collected en masse (or prepared for such collection) by certain EU member states about their citizens and is under active integration with CATCH ALL, and this at the driving behest of the U.S.,represented first and foremost by the NSA as lead manager of the ambitious and super secret CATCH ALL program - a Manhattan Project type program initiated and designed in the mid to late 1990's to create an unassailable strategic information gap between particular interests within the U.S. sphere of influence and all and any potential commercial and political adversaries, be they of foreign or domestic origin.CATCH ALL is perceived by its architects and proponents as critical to ensure the continuity of certain interests faced with quite reasonable projections of major commercial clashes and crisis of global proportions and consequence.
The raw resource for CATCH ALL is the transactional data of individuals - that is to say, your emanations of digital transactional trace evidence generated through transactions with people, corporations, and institutions. Your transactional garbage is being secretly expropriated for the strategic commercial gain for a few without anyone offering to enter into any sort of renumerative contract with you for the raw resources you are unwittingly providing them with.
Your transactional garbage is now worth gold with modern data harvesting and mining technology and it's value is being confiscated from you in a manner that leaves Stalin's collectivization campaign looking like a minor shoplifting infraction. However, if even a small fraction of harvestees were to opt out of voluntarily selling or handing over their transactional junk to CATCH ALL, then the value of all other collected transactionals would sharply depreciate just as the cost of acquiring it would soar. As well, the program is designed to establish an unassailable head start against real and perceived future competitors, ergo it must be carried out in extreme secret until a critical mass is achieved that makes it impossible for any others to catch up and thereby undermine the anticipated competitive advantage CATCH ALL is intended to furnish.
CATCH ALL has to therefor be conducted in secret, per theft or threat, and en masse. CATCH ALL isn't a Bush, Blair, Democrat, or Republican invasion of privacy infraction (though for certain reasons you wouldn't be dead wrong if you called it Clintonesque). It is not a partisan defined attack on your privacy and ownership rights. CATCH ALL is an all or nothing gambit perceived to be of grave national interest and thus is hitherto supported by all elected officials that have been granted a fleeting glimpse at its breathtaking audacity.
Those few elected officials that have been made privy to CATCH ALL will not squeal for fear of being accused of undermining such a levithian project which has been presented and pitched as pivotal to securing America's future welfare in a threateningly encroaching world (and by threateningly encroaching we do not mean a few petty 15 year old Al Qaeda thugs singing Kumbaya in far flung caves under a rain of covertly deployed mini nukes - though they are obviously employed as a ubiquitous threat to ram through various CATCH ALL supporting measures and smoke screens)
CATCH ALL even frames children, as it does all digital trace evidence generating people, as both substrate for resource exploitation per way of their data generating activities and as possible future enemies to interests intent on becoming once and for all impervious to disrupting opposition, ie the achievement of Total Interest Privacy (TIP).
Whatever excuse it takes to access, confiscate, and harvest your reasonably perceived proprietary private information, you will hear it. But you will most likely not be told what is actually up for grabs until you have been pick pocketed clean and your objections can no longer threaten to make a difference. I figure the security scare & rationale package will continue to work quite nicely as it has done so far. It would appear that others figure so too.
British children, possibly as young as six, will be subjected to compulsory fingerprinting under European Union rules being drawn up in secret. The prints will be stored on a database which could be shared with countries around the world.
According to secret documents obtained by Statewatch, the committee will make it compulsory for all children from the age of 12 to be fingerprinted. However, several of the committee's member states are lobbying to bring the compulsory age limit down. Sweden tells the committee it 'could agree with a minimum age of six years for passports'.
The prospect has alarmed civil liberties groups who fear it represents a 'sea change' in the state's relationship with children and one that may lead to juveniles being erroneously accused of crimes. Under laws being drawn up behind closed doors by the European Commission's 'Article Six' committee, which is composed of representatives of the European Union's 25 member states, all children will have to attend a finger-printing centre to obtain an EU passport by June 2009 at the latest.
The use of fingerprints and other biometric data is designed to prevent passport fraud and allow European member states to meet US entry visa requirements, but the decision to fingerprint children has disturbed human rights groups.
The civil liberties group Statewatch last night accused EU governments of taking decisions in which 'people and parliaments have no say'. It said the committee's decisions were simply based on 'technological possibilities - not on the moral and political questions of whether it is right or desirable.'
'This is a sea change,' said Ben Hayes, spokesman for Statewatch. 'We are going from fingerprinting criminals to universal fingerprinting without any real debate. In the long term everyone's fingerprints will be stored on a central database. You have to ask what will be the costs to a person's privacy.'
Fingerprinting young children is considered difficult because their fingers have yet to fully develop. The European Commission notes: 'Scientific tests have confirmed that the paillary ridges on the fingers are not sufficiently developed to allow biometric capture and analysis until the age of six.'
A commission spokesman said initially only member states would have access to their citizens' fingerprint data. However, after the Madrid bombings the commission signalled its intention for all fingerprints to be stored on one database that could one day be accessed by each EU state. 'Whether access for third countries will be allowed has to be decided by the EC at a later stage,' the spokesman said. 'Nevertheless, full interoperability is ensured, should the EU decide to give access to third countries.'
Such a move opens up the possibility that the fingerprints of British children could one day be accessed by foreign intelligence services. 'Secure passports make a lot more sense than ID cards,' said Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty. 'But only as long as the information that is kept is no more than necessary and is not shared with other countries.'
An Excerpt From The Guardian - July 30, 2006
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