Airports are scary places, especially for Americans. Not only could your loved one die in a tragic accident or terrorist incident, but they might also fall at the hands of the "friendlies" - they could be battered to death, unjustly searched or unduly sprayed with mace.
Fortunately, this is not the case in South Africa. We just lose your baggage and have dubious aircraft, for now.
This being said, an airports is also a very intimate place. It is a place where crying children are unattended, the elderly are forgotten and a few individuals who are either leaving or being left, spend a few minutes in a world of emotional clarity and absolute confusion. It is deeply moving and frightfully awakens one's humanity. It is not a place where I want to be reminded of the new Motorola phone or that Gillette gives the best shave.
Continues Below↓The billboards and unceasing advertisements filled with beautiful, happy people detract greatly from this experience. We are used to the huge billboards above national highways, reminding us to be good consumers. But now companies have gone even further, with billboards being fitted with a scanner that can detect how many and for how long passers-by look at the advertisements, and charge big business accordingly.
The scanners will be able to detect for how long the board is watched and by how many pairs of eyes. And thanks to the FBI, the eyes will soon have names and faces.
This concept reminds me distinctly of the eye scanners found in Minority Report, the Steven Spielberg movie that discussed, to an extent, how technology would be able to monitor and regulate the masses.
Fortunately, this was a fictitious creation of an over-active mind … right?
Wrong. According to CNN.com, the FBI is soon expected to announce the awarding of a $1-billion, 10-year contract to help create the database that will compile an array of biometric information - from palm prints to eye scans.
"Adding to the database is important to protect the borders to keep the terrorists out, protect our citizens, our neighbours, our children so they can have good jobs and have a safe country to live in," said Kimberly Del Greco, the FBI's Biometric Services section chief.
But it's unnerving to privacy experts.
"It's the beginning of the surveillance society where you can be tracked anywhere, any time, and all your movements, and eventually all your activities, will be tracked and noted and correlated," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty Project.
The FBI already has 55 million sets of fingerprints on file. In coming years, the bureau wants to compare palm prints, scars and tattoos, iris eye patterns and facial shapes. The idea is to combine various pieces of biometric information to positively identify a potential suspect.
"Fingerprints will still be the big player," said Thomas E Bush, the assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division.
But he added: "Whatever the biometric that comes down the road, we need to be able to plug that in and play."
First up, he said, were palm prints. The FBI has already begun collecting images and hopes to use these as an extra means of making identifications. Countries that are already using such images find 20 percent of their positive matches come from latent palm prints left at crime scenes, said Bush.
The FBI has also started collecting mug shots and pictures of scars and tattoos. These images are being stored for now as the technology is fine-tuned. All of the FBI's biometric data is stored on computers 10 metres underground in the Clarksburg facility.
In addition, the FBI could soon start comparing people's eyes - specifically the iris, or the coloured part of an eye - as part of its new biometrics programme called Next Generation Identification.
Nearby, at West Virginia University's Centre for Identification Technology Research, researchers are already testing some of these technologies that will ultimately be used by the FBI.
"The best increase in accuracy will come from fusing different biometrics together," said Bojan Cukic, the co-director of the centre.
This technology will then be incorporated into public areas to allow the FBI to do scans on individuals without having to catch and contain them, increasing the likelihood of violence-free arrests.
However, this does not change the fact that, for increased safety, a society has to sacrifice more of its rights, more of its freedom. The road that such a programme will take invariably leads down a path that could mean not only are you being watched wherever you go, but monitored by the government. The information can then be relayed to your employer.
The ever-encroaching idea of an Orwell-like society scares and excites, but when the government is already such an untrustworthy entity, I must admit that it scares far more than it excites.
"People who don't think mistakes are going to be made, I don't think fly enough," said Steinhardt.
He said thousands of mistakes had been made with the use of the so-called no-fly lists at airports - and that giving law enforcement widespread data collection techniques should cause major privacy alarms. "There are real consequences to people."
You don't have to be a criminal or a terrorist to be checked against the database. More than 55 percent of the checks the FBI runs involve criminal background checks for people applying for sensitive jobs in the government or jobs working with vulnerable people such as children and the elderly, says the FBI.
The FBI says it hasn't been saving the fingerprints for those checks, but that may change. It plans a so-called "rap-back" service in which an employer could ask the FBI to keep the prints for an employee on file and let the employer know if the person ever has a brush with the law. The FBI says it will first have to clear hurdles with state privacy laws and people would have to sign waivers allowing their information to be kept.
All in all, I am starting to feel rather uncertain when I accidentally wander upon a billboard, and I'm definitely not going to see off people at the airport anymore.
