More civil liberties down the drain in England

Police forces in England are now getting some shiny new toys - portable fingerprint scanners for every department that will allow them to instantly take and check fingerprints from pretty much whoever they want, whenever they want. The "scheme" is named Project Midas:

"Every police force in the UK is to be equipped with mobile fingerprint scanners - handheld devices that allow police to carry out identity checks on people in the street"

They're rapidly moving ever closer to that frighteningly monolithic Big Brother state, in which one can't even walk down a public street without being ordered to prove who they are by the jack-booted thugs.

"To address fears about mass surveillance and random searches, the police insist fingerprints taken by the scanners will not be stored or added to databases."... "Liberty, the civil rights group, cautioned that the law required fingerprints taken in such circumstances to be deleted after use. Gareth Crossman, Liberty's policy director, said: 'Saving time with new technology could help police performance but officers must make absolutely certain that they take fingerprints only when they suspect an individual of an offence and can't establish his identity.'"

Sure they will, and they'll sell you a bridge in New York for cheap as well. Mr. Crossman certainly means well, but he probably hasn't read this article yet, because it only took 6 more paragraphs before a government muckey-muck named Geoff Whitaker began deliriously salivating over all of the neato possibilities for violating subjects' rights with the new baubles:

"Policing of big public occasions, sporting events, festivals, political conferences...could benefit from the equipment, he suggested."

Hmmm. Forcing everyone who attends a public event to submit to fingerprint scanning. That doesn't sound too much like "only using it on a crime suspect where ID can't be established" to me. Anyone else agree?

Just as with any other technology (TASERS and intrusive government surveillance devices such as cameras, for a couple of examples) if the government has a tool capable of accomplishing a task, they WILL use it for that task eventually, no matter how much they protest that they won't. Mission creep is an inevitable result of bureaucrats being given unchecked power with minimal accountability, along with the tools for unleashing that power on an unwilling or uncaring peasantry.

Anyone in Britain who believes that this program won't end up adding their prints for no good reason to the UK's national database is an absolute fool, in my opinion.