Robin Wilton's esoterica

Scott McNealy was renowned for expressing the view that he'd happily have his kids RFID tagged if it meant be could keep track of them. As a father's prerogative, there may be something in that - but when representatives of the 25 EU member states gather behind closed doors to plan the compulsory fingerprinting of children as young as 6, I tend towards deep unease.

This article on The Register, and the House of Lords report it links to contain enough to worry parents and those concerned about civil liberties or data protection.

For instance, the foreword to the House of Lords report concludes as follows:

"We do not understand why the former Home Secretary should have apparently agreed with other G6 ministers to press forward with the 'availability'  principle and disregard data protection issues. This is contrary to the decision of the Member States in the Hague Programme, contrary to the advice of independent data protection authorities, inconsistent with what the Home Office Ministers had told us, and against the views of the Finnish Presidency. The exchange of information between the law enforcement authorities is important, but not so important that civil rights can be eroded."

The G6 group to which the report refers is composed of minsters from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and the UK. Between them, these six countries account for roughly 75% of the EU population.

Here is an example of what the authors of the report mean by 'disgregard [for] data protection issues':

"20. Eurodac is a fingerprint database established under the first pillar solely to assist in the determination of the country responsible for considering asylum applications. It requires all Member States to take the fingerprints of asylum applicants and of others apprehended for the irregular crossing of external borders. The fingerprints are transmitted to a central database which the immigration authorities of other Member States can access, allowing them to check the identity of asylum applicants, and to check whether an alien found illegally present in one Member State has applied for asylum in another Member State. Importantly, fingerprints are erased after ten years; earlier if a person has meanwhile been granted citizenship of a Member State.

21. The Regulation establishing Eurodac does not contemplate police access to Eurodac, nor is there any reason why it should; the fingerprints are collected for the very specific purpose prescribed in Article 1(1) of the Regulation. There is not at present any legislative proposal on the table to widen the scope of Eurodac. Police access to the database held by the Commission would be an entirely new departure.The sole legal basis of the Regulation is Article 63(1)(a) of the EC Treaty, and that alone would be insufficient to allow access for purposes other than those in Article 1(1), whose wording is taken directly from the Treaty."

In other words, the intentions of this G6 group do not just represent a potential threat to the civil liberties of EU citizens and would-be citizens, they also involve taking personally identifiable data collected for one specific purpose and re-using it for an entirely different one (which is explicitly what the EU's own Data Protection provisions are intended to prevent).

What should worry us about this is not just the group's intentions, but the apparent lack of any of the normal transparency and accountability which one would expect from such a policy-forming body operating in the context of a democratic institution.