Originally Posted by
Schmurrr
Agreed. US agencies are grabbing biometric data wherever they can. Texas requires a full set of fingerprints to get a driver's license, and the official reasoning for it is preventing driver's license renewal fraud. Getting a driver's license in Texas now is rather like getting booked. To get licensed as an architect or engineer in Texas, you have to provide a full set of prints, too, though I've yet to see any data that suggest that the practice of architecture or engineering is indicative of high criminal propensity. In any case, it's pointless as a licensure requirement: Someone with ill intent will either not get licensed or will forge a license.
And that kind of ill intent won't even be the worst of it.
It's already possible to use electronically stored fingerprints to forge fingerprints so as to impersonate or frame individuals. And absent the ability and willingness of the government to not use fingerprints unless DNA-sampling from excreted oil (or dead skin cells) -- if any -- was part and parcel of the fingerprint matching used in a criminal or intelligence investigation, this may result in innocent people being falsely convicted or otherwise extrajudicially subject to harassment or who knows what.
It would be foolish to believe that governments are saints and no intelligence service will ever frame someone of a crime for which an individual may be innocent.