My Manifesto: The Incoherent Ramblings of a Madman

The US government is planning on photographing and fingerprintingvisitors from a hell of a lot of countries when they go there. At first I thought, well, who really gives a shit - if you're innocent you have nothing to hide, and if you're not innocent of comitting a crime, then you should be punished. After a bit more thought - it's really quite a dodgy idea. It is going to create the largest database of fingerprints in the world.

Now, we've all heard the old adage that "no two finger prints are alike" - that's all good and well in a utopic world - but our world is far from utopic. The problem is that they only require so many matches on a fingerprint before it is considered to be a match - this was all good and well with the limited amount of fingerprints, of say, an entire state - but when you're basically attempting to catalogue half of the world - there could be any number of duplicate matches floating around there!

Fingerprinting is just to subjective to be of any use on such a large scale and with the limitations we have on matching them (don't even get me started on DNA testing!) is it even worth the time and effort?