The US government has an incredible fingerprint database that it uses to identify potentially troublesome persons coming into the country. The fingerprints are apparently not just of known terrorists, but also appear to be of people that terrorists might have met in various locations. The US is requiring that all ten fingerprints be supplied by visitors to the US, because it appears to be matching latents found through its forensic examination of terrorist meeting spots.

We see in this fascinating graphic of the life of one of the 7/7 bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan, whose network of contacts was vast, why keeping such a database is important:

As Aaron Mannes noted in the Counterterrorism Blog: “The nasty dark blue tangle in the center represents terrorists who passed through Finsbury Park Mosque in London, the light blue tangle next to it is al-Qaeda’s command group. Finsbury Park Mosque’s leader, Abu Hamza al-Masri was an internationally known as a major Islamist figure since at least 1998. He wasn’t arrested until 2004.”

No government agency has the resources to follow the networks in detail, but creating a database that spots friends of terrorists is feasible. Indeed, in a recent interview, Michael Chertoff specifically mentioned that one fellow who was denied entry into the US at O’Hare airport in 2003 by this fingerprint database was subsequently identified as a suicide bomber several years later. Homeland Security found out because his fingerprints were ID’d on the steering wheel of the car he blew himself up in. One reason that we’re a little safer. (HT: Belmont Club)

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2007 at 7:11 am and is filed under General, Religion, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.