Fingerprinting kids
What happened to those fingerprint records I'm not so sure. I suspect they got thrown away. After all, this was the 1970s and I was only 12.
My next encounter with fingerprinting was in the mid-1990s. I was returning to high school teaching after a two year stay in grad school. The small Catholic school I had been hired at demanded I return to the same local police station and be fingerprinted to allow an FBI background check.
I didn't object, knowing I had had not committed any crimes. I also understood that they felt the need to protect the kids from criminals.
Cut to today: kids in a handful of states, including the ones I live in, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, need to be fingerprinted to get their school lunch. Some have this done without their parents permission.
Just this past weekend, outside the supermarket, a woman in front of a booth was looking for volunteers and contributors to her effort to get kids fingerprinted "for their safety".
And somehow, I'm not as comfortable with this as I was 30 years ago.
Here's why, from an article on Phoenix TV station's website in January of this year:
Fred Bellamy is a Phoenix attorney who specializes in Technology Law. He says fingerprinting children without parental consent is sending the wrong message
"It is training children at an early age that it's okay for government to take all that information. That there basically is no privacy," he said.
The school admits they never notified the parents that they were going to scan the children’s fingerprints and store them in a school computer.
How many parents approve of this? Especially for the mundane reason of reducing lunch lines? Not many that I have personally polled.
Bellamy, the tech lawyer, goes on to say: "Once the data are captured . . . no matter what kind of promises the vendor may make, there is a serious risk. And I think the parents have every reason to be concerned about how this data will ultimately be used."
And that's ultimately the point: we used to fingerprint criminals to keep track of them. Now, in this age of global terrorism, we fingerprint children, most of whom have done nothing more wrong than cheat on a test or fight with their sister.
We do this in the name of protection: but protection from what exactly?
So-called Islamofacsists do not seem to have targeted children specfically in their attacks in this country. School shootings have more to do with school security and access and counseling of known troubled youths than in locating missing children. And abductions still adhere to the ages old statistic: 90 percent of them are perpetrated by someone already known to the child.
Therefore, this whole enterprise of fingerprinting our kids is either a charade to make the parents feel more secure, or a ruse to get our children's biometrics into a national database.
My gut tells me it's both.
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