Home Secretary John Reid has agreed with his EU counterparts that in future all air travellers within the EU will be fingerprinted. This is intended as a security measure.

So how is this going to work? Do the EU governments have a database of the fingerprints of every potential terrorist? Of course not. The government plans biometric based "positive profiling" long before the flight.

"Department of PreCrime" anyone?

And there are there are other implications. For the profiling to be carried out in advance the fingerprinting needs to be carried out in advance. Which means when you buy your ticket - fingerprinting at the travel agent. What when you buy online? For that the government will need to be able to reliably link your identity and credit card to your biometrics.

But what use will biometrics be on their own? To perform positive profiling they will also need to be able to link your biometrics to information about your life and habits. They will therefore need a large database of information on every citizen that is linked to identity and biometrics.

You can probably see where this is going by now.

Tony Blair's government has been trying without success to justify imposing on us compulsory biometric Identity Cards and a huge, intrusive National Identity Register (NIR). None of their arguments hold water, the NIR is just part of an authoritarian government's natural desire to build a surveillance state.

If Reid has convinced the other EU governments to agree with this biometric profiling idea, the government can now turn round and say that they must implement the NIR in order to comply with EU agreements. So they persuade the EU to implement a policy that forces them to do what they wanted to do anyway then blame the EU for it. Clever.

Unlike some people I don't believe the government has invented the recent terrorist scares. However I do believe that they have shamelessly exploited them to push forward their own dangerously illiberal agenda.

Tags: NIR UK privacy biometrics ID CardsIdentity Cards John Reid