By Craig Skehan
AUSTRALIANS face having the fingerprints of both hands scanned on arrival in the United States and the details stored on an FBI database, under a reported security crackdown in the country's airports.
The Observer in London has reported that the requirement will begin at 10 selected US international airports and then be extended to all terminals.
Citizens of Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Britain and other European nations would be subject to the new requirement, the report suggests. The Australian Government has refused to confirm whether or not Australians will be forced to participate.
A spokesman for the Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, said last night: "We are not commenting on a newspaper report quoting sources. We'll wait for more official information."
The Observer said that prints are now taken from two fingers. Changing that to all 10 fingers would make the information compatible with the FBI's database. There would be no restrictions on international use of the prints collected, the newspaper said.
The president of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, Terry O'Gorman, last night said he was concerned about the reported measures. "It is a pretty stupid terrorist who leaves his finger prints around," he said.
"Even a beginner criminal knows you use gloves."
He said that even assuming a security case could be made, there would need to be strict protections in place.
However, he warned that experience since the terrorism attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001 showed that promises that fingerprints, DNA and related criminal intelligence would be restricted to terrorism investigations had proved "empty or illusory".
The risk was that prints would be widely distributed to various law-enforcement agencies.
"The Australian Government should be asking the US whether this proposal, as reported, is going to be extended to Australians," Mr O'Gorman said, "because if it is, our position would be [that] fingerprints gathered from passengers should be absolutely quarantined for use only in counter-terrorism investigations."
The Observer reported that a US Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman had confirmed that the new system would be trialled in the northern summer. The paper quoted sources as saying the scheme would be initiated in several airports, including New York, Washington and Miami.
The British civil rights group Liberty suggested the prints' requirement must be part of the "Keystone Cops school of border control" but it would turn thousands of innocent people into terrorism suspects.
The Observer said US officials believed the measure would not deter ordinary people from visiting the US but it would leave any terrorist considering entry to the US worried that he had left fingerprints behind in a safe house.
There have been concerns in both the US and Britain that technological hiccups would result in false fingerprint matches and that there will be longer arrival queues at American airports.
Others have pointed out that terrorists and criminals could use tricks such as covering their figures with latex in order to avoid detection.
The Observer reported that under the new measures, passengers could have their credit card transactions traced when they booked flights to the US.
It said passengers giving their email address to an airline could face an examination of all the messages they had sent and received from that address.