Word from Paris this week is that the G8 nations -- the governments of France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, Canada, and Russia -- have agreed to develop a biometric passport system, perhaps complete with barcode, eye scan, and fingerprints.

Taking the lead on working out the details of the scheme will be the US government and its purported nemesis, the French. They may disagree on the proper level of violence to utilize in engineering an international takeover of a third-world country, but have had an evident meeting of the minds on the necessity of tracking and tracing their own citizens in the most Orwellian ways possible. The two countries hope to have the details worked out by the end of the year and to roll out the brave new papers by the end of 2004.

And leave it to the United Kingdom, the homeland of Big Brother, to use the plan as a pretext for mandating such identification papers for all their citizens, not just those who have the temerity to travel. Home Secretary Jack Straw told the London Daily Telegraph that the new passports would be an excellent mechanism to do just that. No doubt the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators is salivating at the idea of similarly bootstrapping their plan to biometrically ID all Americans via their drivers' licenses.

The international track-and-trace scheme will of course be justified by invoking the terror bogeyman. If the leaders of these nations are so afraid of terrorists, it might be a better idea for them to just watch who they let enter their countries and grant citizenship to, rather then subjecting the personal details of their own citizens to the whims of international bureaucracy. The Patriot Act and other measures have in the past two years set up a number of programs to track who is enteing the United States. Yet apparently this is not enough for the US government, as its delegation in Paris, led by Attorney General Ashcroft, has decided to take the lead in designing a system to biometrically catalogue Americans. This is akin to the scheme that has the Canadians telling Homeland Security about every American who egresses the US by the Northern border -- while the Southern border is virtually wide open -- no retina scan required!

It would be a miracle if such a card system were made to work without saving the biometric data in government databases, as a pilot program at Amsterdam airport is purportedly doing. Some US states already require submission to a fingerprint database in order to get a driver's license.

What can we expect from the massive new database ostensibly designed to prevent identity fraud? Well, we already know that fingerprint scans can be forged with gummi worm technology. As Congressman Ron Paul (and numerous others) point out, "transformation of the Social Security number into a de facto uniform identifier . . . facilitates the crime of identity theft." A recent GAO report provided a handful of the many examples of poor security practices the federal government uses in protecting SSNs.

All of this is because Congress has increasingly acquiesced to, or indeed mandated, the widespread use of the SSN as an identifier by government and business. If France, Ashcroft, and the G8 push this scheme through Congress, can we expect any better in the future. Today, when one punches "SSN" into google, at the top right of the results is a little ad selling personal information based on nothing more than the government-issued number. How long will it be before a similar ad pops up when you search on fingerprints? You might ask the gaggle of Privacy Villains in Paris.

By James Plummer

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