Alex Lo

My Take | The West will soon be sharing their citizens’ biometric data

If you already think China’s state surveillance is intrusive and dystopian, you have not yet seen the brave new world that is just over the horizon

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Alex Lo

Published: 9:00pm, 28 Jul 2022

You have probably read news stories about how China is building the world’s largest surveillance network and that the country is becoming a hi-tech dystopian nightmare.

Well, the United States, Europe and many of their allied states are catching up and may soon be exceeding China’s surveillance capabilities. That’s because their systems will not only be domestic like China’s, but also transnational and fully convergent. Many of them may soon be sharing your most personal data with each other.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is offering select foreign governments access to its vast biometric database of its own citizens in exchange for similar access to their systems. That’s according to Statewatch, a British-based NGO that monitors state policies and civil rights across Europe.

Under the “Enhanced Border Security Agreements”, the DHS will be targeting all 40 countries whose citizens enjoy visa-free travel to the US for up to 90 days for the mass data-sharing arrangement. These include most of the 27 member states of the European Union, Britain, Israel, New Zealand, Australia, Japan and South Korea.

Unsurprisingly, Britain and Israel are reportedly on board for the pact. The DHS is approaching individual EU member states directly to bypass the European Commission, which is more likely to insist on the EU’s much higher legal protection standards for personal data than the US.

The US database being offered is called the IDENT/HART, described as the largest of its kind and containing 270 million identities with their 1.1 billion “encounters” or incidents associated with their records. The programme itself, according to Statewatch, is internally called the “DHS International Biometric Information Sharing (IBIS) Program and Enhanced Biometric Security Partnership (EBSP)”.