A few days back I wrote a diary about how the US is requiring every foreign visitor from a visa waiver country to provide two electronic fingerprints on entering the country.

Well folks, it’s not just foreigners – or even ports of entry any more. It’s coming home to your (or someone’s) local library.

Details below the fold.
Today’s BoingBoing links to the following WaPo article:

Ill. Library Getting Fingerprint Scanners

NAPERVILLE, Ill. — Library officials in this suburb west of Chicago have come up with a high-tech solution for keeping unauthorized visitors from using their computers: fingerprint scans.

The scanners _ to be installed on 130 library computers this summer _ will verify the identity of computer users.

Library officials said they wanted to tighten computer access because many people borrow library cards and pass codes from friends or family to log on. The technology also will help the library implement a new policy that allows parents to put filters on their children’s’ accounts, officials said.

But privacy advocates have criticized the plan, which would make Naperville only the second library system in the nation to use fingerprint-scanning technology, according to the American Library Association.

“We take people’s fingerprints because we think they might be guilty of something, not because they want to use the library,” said Ed Yohnka, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union in Illinois.

Sorry Ed, not any more.

Using this technology in a library is particularly sensitive in light of current “homeland security” law, which the article summarizes thusly:

Library records have been the focus of a privacy debate ever since Congress passed the Patriot Act shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. A provision of the law authorizes federal officials to obtain “tangible items” like credit card receipts and library records as part of foreign intelligence or international terrorism investigations.

For its part, the library is seeking to play down the effects of the system:

Naperville library officials said the technology cannot be used to reconstruct a person’s actual fingerprint. The scanners, made by Naperville-based U.S. Biometrics Corp., use an algorithm to convert 15 or more specific points into a unique numeric sequence.

…

[Mark] West [the library’s deputy director] said the numeric data cannot be cross-referenced with fingerprint databases kept by the FBI or state police.

Mr. West may be sincere, but he is way off the point. This application is not about imaging fingerprints or finding out which of the library’s patrons are in a federal database – the library patrons have identified themselves sufficiently to be traceable in order to obtain their library cards. It is about reliability identifying what users are online when. From there it is a simple database coding task to link the user with the content she is viewing (note that the individual filtering cited as a reason for implementing this system indicates that a user-by-user content monitoring functionality is already implemented here). This data then becomes part of the records that federal authorities can obtain under the Patriot Act.

While I understand why parents might want to control the content their children can access, the solution the Naperville library is implementing has a lot of potential for recording sensitive personal information.

Keep an eye on your libraries.

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