The government could be seeking new powers for the police to fingerprint people who break parking rules or drop litter.

A consultation paper is today published on a review of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which sets the boundaries for most police powers, though it’s been subject to a lot of amendments and revisions since then. Currently fingerprints can be taken compulsarily only from those suspected of recordable offences. The document states (see p11):

The absence of the ability to take fingerprints etc in relation to all offences may be considered to undermine the value and purpose of having the ability to confirm or disprove identification and, importantly, to make checks on a searchable database aimed at detecting existing and future offending and protecting the public.

We all want to cut crime, but these days almost all offences are recordable, and only the most minor still count as non-recordable - mostly littering, parking and the like. Do the police need to check litterers against a national database? If the inability to take fingerprints for specific offences is causing problems, those offences could be made “recordable” so that prints can be demanded.

The onus must be on police and the government to show these powers are necessary. Too often the debate is set so that those opposed to extension of powers have to prove why they aren’t needed. Let us hope that doesn’t happen here.

Security consultant Adam Laurie has demonstrated in the Daily Mail how a new UK biometric passport can be cloned without even being removed from its delivery envelope. The government tends to laugh off questions about the risks associated with the new ePassports - see this letter from Joan Ryan in the Guardian where she claims:

It is no more remarkable that the basic information on the chip can be copied than it would be for someone to photocopy the same information that you can read on the personal details page of the passport.

John Lettice explains at The Register why such a dismissive response is short sighted at best:

The newly-delivered passport envelope was rerouted, and a working key was identified within four hours. Once this has been done, a fraudster would have all of the information needed to copy the chip, and therefore would be some considerable distance closer to being able to produce an identical copy of the entire passport.

The Mail notes that no proof of identity was required when the passport was delivered, but the vulnerabilities exposed mean that the problem goes far beyond the occasional passport being cloned after its delivery has been intercepted. Because it’s feasible to steal the data without detection, it’s perfectly possible that insiders could intercept large numbers of the millions of new passports delivered every year.

Given that we expect the same RFID chips to be used in ID cards, these vulnerabilities could prove extremely serious.

The Sunday Times reports that children as young as 11 are to be fingerprinted for passports:

Leaked Home Office plans show that the mass fingerprinting will start in 2010, with a batch of 295,000 youngsters who apply for passports.

The Home Office expects 545,000 children aged 11 and over to have their prints taken in 2011, with the figure settling at an annual 495,000 from 2014. Their fingerprints will be held on a database also used by the Immigration and Nationality Directorate to store the fingerprints of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers.

But this isn’t the first foray into mass fingerprinting of children. At least 3000 schools are taking fingerprints from children as young as three, usually without parental consent or guidelines for protecting the data. Leave Them Kids Alone is running a campaign to end this, together with the Lib Dem Education team.

But the UK also systematically takes fingerprints from asylum seekers from the age of 5 upwards - they report “no problems” doing so in this EU report. And they’ve trialled taking fingerprints from under-5s, just in case those asylum toddlers go out on the rampage, I suppose.