Brian Rudman: Give the boss the finger? What rapture it will be

COMMENT

I'm a card-carrying member of the Beware Big Brother Club, but I suspect that fellow member David Barnes, an Auckland printer, has gone a bit over the top in preferring unemployment to sticking his finger in his company's new-fangled time-clock.

Indeed I'd find it rather liberating to be free of the various security swipe cards and passwords that are now part of the grind of daily life, and present my fingerprint as proof that I am who I say I am.

Mr Barnes is fearful of two big brothers. One, the figurative one that's itching to manipulate our lives for his own economic pleasure here on Earth. Mr Barnes says he doesn't want to be a tool in that brother's highly regulated society. He's also worried about the big guy upstairs, reckoning that to surrender his fingerprint would somehow stamp him with the Mark of the Beast and jeopardise his chances of joining Christ in the biblical Rapture of the second coming, if and when it occurs.

Now I hasten to bow out of the Cor Blimey side of this argument, except to suggest to Mr Barnes that by my untutored reading of the Book of Revelation, he should be all right as long as he uses the fingers of his left hand in the infernal machine, because according to the relevant revelation, the Mark of the Beast will manifest itself specifically only on the right hand or the forehead.

But back in the here and now, the idea of carrying around a personal identifier which I can never leave in another coat pocket, or forget in a "senior moment" of forgetfulness, sounds like heaven on Earth.

With a bit of inventiveness, they could have a finger reader on the bus as well or, better still, alongside the bus stop, which should speed up the ride into town no end.

Think of the cards and passwords I could then, forever, forget. The clunky swipe card that gets me into the building and operates the lift doors for one. Then there's the passwords to enter my work and home computers, along with, at work, others to get into word processing, library and message software programs. Then there's phone codes, my burglar alarm and various credit, library and supermarket cards. What rapture to be able to empty the wallet and give the finger to one and all instead.

The flaw in Mr Barnes' Mark of the Beast worries is that while he refuses to use a credit card, for the same reason as he wants to keep his fingerprint to himself, he had presumably been happy to use his company's old time-clock to punch himself in and out of work. As I recall, a punch clock uses coded cards, each unique to a user, which is the precursor to credit card barcodes and the technology that reduces the swirls and curls of a fingerprint into a unique combination of numbers. I fear for him that they are all equally marked by the beast.

As for finger-scanning, well of course no system is perfect. I can imagine the very rich or powerful of nervous disposition getting a little twitchy at the thought a determined scoundrel might now be forced to lop off their fingers to get to their loot or secrets. They'll be reassured to hear safety mechanisms are being built into scanning devices to check on vital signs such as the temperature of a finger and underlying blood circulation, to ensure amputated fingers do no work.

Electronic fingerprinting is just one way of identifying each person's unique physical characteristics in this new science of biometrics. Others include retina scans, hand geometry, thumb scans, voice recognition and automated facial mapping.

It's the latter that is giving civil libertarians like the American Civil Liberties Union the most concerns. With the war on terrorism in full swing, the International Civil Aviation Organisation wants all passports to include a facial map of the holder. Civil libertarians fear that by 2015, there'll be an international database of travellers, allowing Big Brothers world-wide to track our movements.

So far, the technology can't do it; trials around the world have been mismatching on a giant scale. But when it is perfected, so what? Passports already carry basic information about us on a barcode and life goes on. Big Brother, if he's interested, already knows all.