By Five Eyes Nations are Behind the Push for Biometric Collecting and Sharing of Personal Data
by Gill Bonnett of RNZ | Sourced from Blacklisted News
What started as a scheme to check the identities of a few thousand asylum seekers has spiralled into a vast network of data about everyone who comes and goes from the Five Eyes nations.
On the third floor of a central Auckland office building, people are silently queueing. The atmosphere is tense. It’s always tense.
Day after day, people lined up at the United States Consulate anxiously wait, clutching the myriad documents they need to work or study in America. They’ve sent in their applications, given up their personal details, their social media handles, their photos, and evidence of their reason for visiting. They press their fingerprints on to a machine to be digitally recorded. Then, a brief (and sometimes harsh) interview with an official at a counter window in full view of an uneasy queue.
But in 2024, that personal information can crisscross the planet in seconds. There’s no way of knowing how it is used, or which countries it ends up in.
New Zealand, the US, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom — commonly known as the Five Eyes partners — have for the past 15 years built a burgeoning network to share ever more information about the people who cross each country’s border.
At first, the agreement was to check mainly asylum seekers’ fingerprints with one another — up to 3000 fingerprints each annually. When there was a match, more information would be shared.
But the hunger for more data has had that jump to 30,000 and then 400,000 — per country, per partner, per year — a total of 8 million checks. And it’s now not only asylum seekers, but any traveller, visitor or migrant. Those “maximums” can also be increased by mutual consent. The UK now says it may reach the point where it checks everyone it can with its Migration 5 partners.
This has all happened largely without public discussion and seemingly little oversight.
But a months-long RNZ investigation has drawn out key details. Using background interviews with officials and experts, documents obtained from countries under official information laws, US Congressional reports and archive records, this is the story of how Migration 5 was formed, what is being shared and why it has all been such a closely guarded secret.
THE BIRTH OF THE MIGRATION 5
Migration 5′s goal has developed into a slogan: “Known to One, Known to All.” The five countries want to share everything they know about everyone who enters their respective countries.
It was preceded by a defence pact reached after World War II for intelligence sharing. New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the US and the UK built on those arrangements over time.
After the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on the US, a “no-fly list” was shared among states. But it had errors caused by its reliance on names. Photos were more readily available than fingerprints through immigration records, but matching them is much more fraught, controversial and inaccurate.
Biometrics was quickly recognized as a better way to track the “bad guys”. Read Full Article >
