On Finger-printing

Sometime back I read a column in the Sunday Times of India by a certain high-profile Indian author - mentioned oftentimes in the media as 'one of the leading Indian women novelists' - describing her latest visit to the USA. She wrote about her experience on being fingerprinted and strip-searched and said it was no big deal, just par for the course so to speak, especially when it was a course you were so hell-bent on visiting anyway. The US officials are so polite and efficient it's apparently a breeze being patted down by them, and well, you know, thanks to modern technology, you don't even need to leave with ink under your fingernails. One other writer before her also mentioned this process with, if anything, even more gush - I mean, how incredibly thoughtful of the US, you know - saving us all the trouble of having to scrub our hands with a deadly vigor for a fortnight or so. Apparently, all you have to do is place your palm where indicated and before you know it you've been fingerprinted! So simple! I don't see why people seem to be having such a problem with this, continued this writer loftily, they don't have any issues with getting photographed, do they? So, let's see, if you don't mind having your photograph on your Passport, you shouldn't mind having your finger-prints on the US government's computer records.

This reminds me - to get a little side-tracked as usual - of the time I went to the passport office to renew mine. There were a couple of middle-aged men there who were filling out application forms and having a tough time understanding some of the requirements. After much mutual arguing they decided to seek assistance from the nearest person - me. Excuse me, one of them said, do you know where we can find an ink pad? In a stationery shop perhaps, I said. You mean, the other fellow said indignantly, they don't have one ready over here, we have to go buy one ourselves for a two minute job of impressing our thumb prints on this? I looked at them carefully - the policy of thumb prints is for the illiterate and they really didn't strike me as coming from that bracket - and actually I thought I had overheard this very fellow say something about being a bank clerk earlier. You're a bank clerk, right, I said. Right, he said. That means you can read and write, right, I inquired. I work at the State Bank of India, said the chap offended, both of us, we're colleagues actually, what do you mean can I read and write? Well, then just put your signature on the form, I said. Well, of course I did, he said sharply, showing me a mighty scrawling flourish, but it also says here 'Fixate your thumb print'....

And that revives another memory. After Art College, I accompanied a friend to the government job registry so she could register herself - they weren't exactly chockfull of jobs, but if you did manage to land one, she explained, you were set for life, good salary with a pension to follow, and not all that much work either - I mean look at our professors, she said, all they do is say draw this or draw that and that's it, and then they go do whatever - listen, why don't you register too? - the requirement is only 10th pass or fail. No thanks, I said, not tempted, and waited by the window while she and the whole crowd that was there went inside to register. They were sat one to a bench, given a lengthy form and told to fill this without discussing it with their neighbors. For a while there was silence, just some rustling of the papers and diligent scratching of ball-point pens. Pssst, said my friend then cheerfully, beckoning me nearer and holding out the form for my viewing, look at this. I looked. At the very end it said if you don't know how to sign, please imprint your thumb-mark here. That, she said, must be for the 10th fail - assuming they can read.

Anyway, to get back to the US government policy of finger-printing, I don't care what reasons or excuses the 'intellectuals' come up with in its support. I personally think that finger-printing when one is quite capable of wielding the pen and before one has committed any crime is one hell of an exercise to humiliate, intimidate, embarrass, and offend. And I find it alarming that the procedure has been accepted so matter-of-factly.

And while I can understand a strip search at least, I'm unable to comprehend how exactly finger-printing is going to help security anyway. How exactly is it going to deter the terrorists? The Suicide Bombers probably aren't going to give a damn where they leave their prints, and I haven't heard of finger-prints telling before-hand what someone is going to do. The rest of them will most likely resort to wearing gloves or, taking a page from Tom Cruise's 'Mission Impossible 2', fake finger-prints. As I read in the Washington Post the other day, a Japanese cryptographer has ably demonstrated how finger-prints can be easily lifted off a glass - but, of course, I already knew that too beforehand, thanks again to Hollywood.

Now just imagine the scenario, someone lifting your print after a restaurant outing or someone hacking the US database - any site can be hacked by a determined and knowledgeable enemy - and picking at random your finger-prints. A bomb goes off somewhere nearby and you, as luck would have it, don't have a fool-proof alibi. Now what? Some R&R and TLC at Guantanamo for being an unlawful combatant, what else?

But this possibility can always be avoided. As the famous writer pointed out, it's take it or leave it - you can always leave it and visit a 'friendly' country instead. And to paraphrase a famous President - you're for us or against us - so if you don't want to be on our side of earth, stay on the other side.

Many, like the Italian Philosopher and Political Theorist Giorgio Agamben, have already chosen that alternative. He gives his reasons - "A few years ago I wrote that the political model of the west is not the city but the concentration camp, not Athens but Auschwitz. That was, of course, a philosophical, not a historical thesis. This is not about mixing phenomena that must be separated. I only want to remind readers that the tattooing in Auschwitz possibly appeared as 'normal' and economic in order to regulate the admission of the deportees to the camp. The bio-political tattooing, which we are forced to undergo today in order to enter the United States is a relay race to what we could tomorrow accept as the normal registration of the identity of the good citizen considering the mechanisms and machinery of the state."