Because if you can’t trust fingerprint and expensive computerized fingerprint systems, who can you trust?
Benson was wrongfully imprisoned for 43 days for carrying a firearm when a convicted felon, although the felony on his record had been committed by someone else, while Espinoza, had his restaurant business destroyed by a false record of a criminally negligent homicide conviction. The plaintiffs claim that their problems stemmed from Identix’s Livescan 10-print, a fingerprint scanner used to enter fingerprint data into police systems. Two months ago Identix was re-confirmed as the winner of a Department of Homeland Security Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) for fingeprint systems, this being worth and estimated $27 million over five years. Identix is also supplying equipment for the UK Passport Service’s ID card pilot, so one might reasonably consider that the stakes in San Jose Superior Court will be rather high.
Swell.
The problem is not, in fact, with the fingerprint identification, or even with the electronic nature of the system per se, but with more than one case of two different fingerprint records being given the same “unique” record number — which means that when someone takes my fingerprints, and the system identifies me as FPN 10047, the criminal record that gets pulled up may be for someone else who was given FPN 10047 (even if they have very different fingerprints than mine).
Again, swell.
And, of course, since it’s coming out of a highly sophisticated computer system — who’s going to pay attention, right?