Jon Boone in Kabul, The Guardian
The young man reluctantly proffered his eyeballs and fingertips to an American soldier wielding a hi-tech box resembling an outsize digital camera.
As the machine slowly gathered his biometric details, the man looked increasingly ill at ease. Was it because his herd of goats had started to wander off? Or because the device was revealing that he was in some way mixed up with the insurgency?
With each iris and fingertip scanned, the device gave the operator a steadily rising percentage chance that the goat herder was on an electronic “watch list” of suspects. Although it never reached 100%, it was enough for the man to be taken to the nearest US outpost for interrogation.
Since the Guardian witnessed that incident, which occurred near the southern city of Kandahar earlier this year, US soldiers have been dramatically increasing the vast database of biometric information collected from Afghans living in the most wartorn parts of southern and eastern Afghanistan.
The US army now has information on 800,000 people, while another database developed by the country’s interior ministry has records on 250,000 people.
It is the sort of operation that would horrify civil liberties campaigners in the west, but there has been little public debate in Afghanistan. Kitted out with handheld devices that contain a camera to scan eyes and an electronic pad to take fingerprints, US soldiers have been collecting huge amounts of biometric data, with little oversight from the Afghan government.
The US hopes that Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, can be persuaded to set up a much more ambitious national biometric ID system that would hold information on every Afghan citizen from the age of 16.
Although such a move would potentially be bad news for people’s privacy, it would unquestionably make life harder for insurgents.
Already the technology, which was originally introduced in US bases in the Balkans in the early 2000s, is helping to catch dozens of wanted suspects a week. Information collected in the field is checked against a central database containing hundreds of thousands of fingerprints found by US army forensics labs on materials touched by insurgents: weapons, sticky tape from homemade bombs, and even receipts for wire transfers of money used to pay for the rebel cause.
