I fail to see how giving your biometrics and opening your life to government inspections for the chance of less hassle is a win for anyone but Big Brother. Throw the sheep a bone, make it seem like it's easier while clamping down on them, and they'll bleat all the way to the slaughter.
If I'm going to get harassed anyway, they can do it WITHOUT my info.
+1. And I should add I'm what many people here in TS/S would believe to be a liberal, "socialist" type.
Honestly, I fail to understand how anyone would be more willing to allow an iris or fingerprint scan than to provide his or her credit history.
I'm sorry, but I just have a real problem with allowing government access to intimate features of my actual physical being. As in, there's no way in hell I'll provide this information unless my alternative is a gulag in Kamchatka. (And I have a 20-year credit history, a high-700s credit score, and not so much as a speeding ticket to my name.)
- I don't trust TSA to safeguard this information. This is an agency that's proven time and again it can't be trusted, and it can't even ferret out the problem of petty larceny among its staff people. So now we're going to give away even more of the candy store?
- Crafting a massive database trove of valuable information will present an almost irresistible temptation to some Fed to misuse it. How'd you like your entire credit history & background to be provided to some corporation b/c they made a giant campaign contribution to Candidate X? I'd bet any amount of money that will happen if this goes through.
- I've had problems in the past with not agreeing with my government 100% of the time. Can I be sure that government won't use its database to find and persecute people they don't want making a fuss...over issues like its tendency to trample the civil rights of its citizens?
- (Various other practical considerations)...etc.
To me, this is an unconscionable expansion of a police-state-like mentality, being imposed under the flimsiest of rationales. You're 100 times more likely to be hit by lightning than to die in terrorist incident. I just don't see the point.