The sickest part of this is that it’s being sold by the BBC as a great step that’s going to stop voter fraud.

From the article:

When we visited the town in the suffocating heat of a Bangladeshi summer, two lines of people, one for men and one for women, were queuing outside a government building.

Inside, they were invited to sit down by young soldiers, who took their photographs and fingerprints and stored them as digital images.

A number of such centres have been set up across the district.

So far, more than 46,000 people have come to re-register as voters and claim their place in what they hope will be a fraud-free voting future.

“The new system will mean only I can cast my vote,” one woman tells me.

“Whatever happened earlier,” another man says, “God willing, Bangladesh will now have a real free and fair election again.”

The funny thing is they already do this to us here. Most states make you give your fingerprint to get a driver’s license, and under the REAL ID Act all of this will go into a national database.

I remember first hearing of programs like this about a year or two ago, but the speed with which they’ve spread is truly astounding.

More and more schools in the US, UK, and other countries are making children purchase their school lunches by scanning their fingerprints. Variations on this idea include scanning a finger to check out library books, and for tracking students on school buses.

Think about this. If you’re reading this, most likely the idea of having to scan your fingerprint to do anything is atrocious. That’s because we’ve been raised in a society where only criminals have their fingerprints taken. Only in recent years have we seen adults being fingerprinted for travel purposes, but these programs are small in comparison to the programs targeted at our children.

If you can’t see that this is by design then you’re either extremely ignorant, or in denial.

One other thing I’ve noticed is how privacy concerns are brushed away by saying they don’t actually keep the fingerprint, just a number generated based on 45 different locations on the fingerprint. This is the biggest line of shit out of the whole story. That’s they same way they store any fingerprint they get, whether it’s a 2nd grader or a murderer, they call go into the computer the same.

While all of this seems overwhelming, and people say “what can I do about it?” here is some hope. Some schools have rejected these proposals. The key to beating this is to be involved. Get mad. Go to school board meetings. Organize with other parents. No one wants their child fingerprinted like this, but most people are to busy working or watching American Idol to care.

You can make a difference. Be a leader, and stand up for what’s right!