The United States requires Americans who are planning to adopt overseas to have a thorough police check, which includes, among many other requirements, submitting fingerprints to the FBI. I always figured the fingerprints were sitting somewhere, unused but if I should, say, turn up dead on federal property, someone might think to look me up. But that's a different matter from having moved, wholesale, everyone's fingerprints into a database used to run down terrorists. It is, I fear, yet another step into the collecting of vast amounts of personal information by the feds, to be used who knows how and by whom. We can't catch Osama bin Laden but, by God, we know about those adoptive parents!
Two elements, in particular, bother me:
the adoptive parents angle:
The DHS already has a database of millions of sets of fingerprints, which includes records collected from U.S. and foreign travelers stopped at borders for criminal violations, from U.S. citizens adopting children overseas, and from visa applicants abroad. There could be multiple records of one person's prints.
and this:
The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.
What? Where's the line between corporations and the government? And what constitutes "Brushes with the law"? A protest? So someone notifies your boss? What kind of nonsense is this? For people who bitch about the Democrats' and their alleged "Nanny State" some people sure are interested in trading it in for a police state.
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