Suburban Chicago Libraries to Get the Finger

It’ll soon be necessary to provide a fingerprint to use the computers in the libraries in Naperville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Until now, you could access them with your library card and an ID number, but library officials argue that this system has been abused, with people using the cards of their friends and relatives. The library system in Buffalo, New York, has some fingerprint ID capability and allows patrons in the downtown library to opt for it rather than using a library card, but Naperville will be the first library in the U.S. in which fingerprints are intended to be mandatory.

Library officials don’t seem to think it’s a big deal. Deputy Director Mark West told the Chicago Tribune, "Right now we give you a library card with a bar code attached to it. This is just a bar code, but it's built in." To make sure we realize that he doesn’t take the situation lightly, he also insisted, "Confidentiality and privacy [are] my middle name."

Ed Yohnka, on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, provided the expected response: "We take people's fingerprints because we think they might be guilty of something, not because they want to use the library."

The library claims that the technology they will use reads the print of an index finger, takes 15 or more specific points, and uses an algorithm to translate those points into a sequence of numbers. The library insists that this information can’t be used to reconstruct a fingerprint and can’t be cross-referenced with other fingerprint databases such as those used by law enforcement.

Bottom line? As long as circumstances never change (and they don’t, do they?) there’s nothing to worry about. After all, it’s not like Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is working on an even more draconian version of the Patriot Act, is it?