ITWeb today carries a report on the MorphoTouch, a new piece of technology a gleeful police force is punting as the bane of criminals everywhere.
I, for one, do not want every traffic cop with a bright orange BMW to treat me like a criminal while also snickering about my many psychological disorders.
Phillip de Wet, News Editor, ITWeb
The MorphoTouch allows the comparison of a fingerprint taken from a scanner on the device with either 50 000 prints stored on the unit itself or a remote database.
At the same time, the Department of Home Affairs is busy digitising all of the 40 million or so fingerprint records it has on paper, which theoretically covers every South African citizen. The database will eventually be used in conjunction with identity smart cards, which will carry a range of information about its owner. The debate around what kind of information it should contain has not been finalised, but things like drivers licence details, and health and welfare records are strong contenders.
The two systems are not linked at the moment; by law the police cannot access the general fingerprint database to finger suspects, if you`ll excuse the pun. The policy have to request specific records to check if they match a print found at the scene of a crime, and that restriction will stay in place.
Yet it is not difficult to imagine a scenario where the doors of the Hanis database are thrown open to the police, either officially by a change in legislation or behind the scenes. The public has no insight into the workings of Hanis, and it would be damn near impossible to tell if there was an electronic link between the Pretoria data centre where the information is stored and police headquarters.
There are obvious reasons to allow the police full access to Hanis. In a country where crime is still the top concern, anything that eases the job of law enforcers is sure to be applauded. There are also obvious reasons to maintain the integrity of Hanis. As noted before in this column, the system could easily be sabotaged by a public that falls for the "Orwellian nightmare" line bandied about by some people the moment they hear mention of a central government database of any kind.
Getting smart
The MorphoTouch brings something new to the equation, however, not least of all because the little unit can also function as a smart card reader. This means that police at a roadblock could, theoretically, check your fingerprints against those of known criminals. If there are no matches they could slip your identity smart card into a reader and check your name, and then run that through another check. Not all wanted criminals are kind enough to leave fingerprints on record, after all.
Of course there will be no law forcing you to have your identity smart card about your person at all times. But it will probably double as a driving licence, which you have to have with you if you are the driver of a car.
Again, the police cannot force you to reveal your identity without suspicion of wrongdoing. But in many cities, traffic officers have become metropolitan police, and a traffic officer has every right to demand that a driver produce a valid licence.
I, for one, do not want every traffic cop with a bright orange BMW to treat me like a criminal while also snickering about my many psychological disorders.
So where do we draw the line? Do we, first of all, allow the police to cold-check suspects` prints against every record the government has? At least a couple of extra criminals will be caught that way, after all.
Then, do we lobby to prevent the police from accessing identity smart cards? There is probably no arm of government that has greater need of a reliable way of confirming identity, and doing so negates much of the positive impact Hanis could have.
I do not have the answers, but I am concerned about the questions. Let us hope that a general debate will precede the implementation of the Hanis IDs and these issues will be raised. If not, we may indeed find ourselves sorry to have traded privacy for convenience once it is too late.
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