Fingered
I recently represented Gun Free South Africa at a workshop organised by the CSIR. They are working on a vast research project that will examine violence in South Africa and hopefully impact on policy well into the future.
We were asked to share our ideas about what a safe and secure South Africa might feel / look like.
One response was: “Survive Alive”
Another: “You watch a little girl riding on a bicycle and a butterfly flits past. You have time to watch the butterfly because you are not worried about the little girl.”
Someone said they want to live in a society that has open doors and where her own front door is unlocked.
I thought about the “New Jerusalem” in Revelation. The image is one of a city built out of precious stones. Walls built with diamonds, rubies and the like would be beautiful, transparent and still functional. For me, that is my dream for SA; I look forward to the day when the structures of our society are life affirming (beautiful), not sinister (transparent) and work efficiently (functional).
Which raises a question (amongst others) of why Home Affairs needs my fingerprints when I apply for an ID book? What purpose does it serve to have my fingerprints?
Home Affairs says that its system is separate from the police (and I assume intelligence services) and is not used for finding people whose prints turn up on crime scenes. The HA fingerprints are used exclusively to establish the unique identity of each person.
But, by its own admission, HA is rife with corruption. It is relatively easy to procure an identity document. Apparently the manual system for storing and acquiring fingerprints is partly to blame for the ease with which crooks are selling fake identities. Why will a more complicated system change this necessarily? What is about fingerprints and computers that will make it harder for people to fake and steal identities any more than say, photographs or retinal scans?
Furthermore, while it is not impossible that two people with the same name could be born on the same day in the same place, surely the odds are stacked hugely in favour of this information creating a reasonably discreet individual identity without the hassle and expense of maintaining a technology intensive electronic fingerprinting archive.
Is the current system efficient? No. Will a new computerised be more efficient? Yes, but at what expense?
Is the system life affirming? No – taking my prints makes me feel like a criminal.
Is the system transparent? No. I think there are undeclared interests at play. At best, somebody stands to benefit from the investment in the new technology for a fingerprint database while holding out the carrot of incorruptibility. At worst, the assurance that fingerprints are used only for identification purposes is a lie.
1 comment:
Thanks for the views on community safety, and on the peculiar requirement by Home Affairs for fingerprints of all citizens, and their intention to computerise all citizens' fingerprints. To my mind it makes graft even easier when all data is available on computer. Graft is a poison in our society, but before this there is the poison in our society of the incessant desire to make more (and quicker) money than a salary can provide. There are possibly several reasons for this: salaries are inadequate in the face of inflation; people want more money than their salaries and needs; globalisation has made everybody vulnerable to the price of things and the kinds of financial pulling power that is experienced 'overseas', people want to have 'lifestyles' rather than 'lives'. Internet commerce is all done by the dollar, pitched at international rates. There is a bizarre paradox in South Africa: the sense that all things are possible, that we are part of an international economy and we think we can all share in the luxuries and benefits of that; and at the same time we remain a modest economy, with modest costs and modest remuneration. Realism is needed rather than the constant urge to make good, to get rich, to be on the make. But the role models that are put before all of us in all the media urge the opposite to realism: win this or that, get a glitzy lifestyle, get bling, buy huge petrol-heavy cars, buy holiday lifestyles, and so on. We live in a fool's paradise in many respects, and all the media keep urging this. So does the ghastly value systems of public figures with their expensive cars, their ridiculous and vulgar houses, and so forth. Small wonder that folk who are on modest salaries but have dodgy means to make sudden windfalls are tempted to corruption. Can we perhaps think of ways to propagandise what might be meant by the Kingdom of God among us? (Which would in fact dovetail with issues such as esteem, worth, selflessness, appropriate forms of patriotism - other than the silly simulacra of eschatology set up by mantras such as 2010.) South Africans once were in touch with their economy in the deepest sense - ecos, oicos, home, environment - as folk who knew the value of arable land, who knew the value of hard work, of big ideals matched with careful realism. Can we work on a nationwide project about Imagining the Kingdom Now, to put back realism and good judgement and to fight against inflated identity and desire?
Peter M
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