Tube engineers face fingerprint check-ins
April 18th, 2006Rail chiefs have unveilled plans to ensure thousands of Tube workers turn up on time by introducing a hi-tech fingerprint scanning device.
Up to 8,000 engineers, track and signal staff willhave to pass their fingerprints over a computer scanner to clock in and out of work.
Unions have hit out at the plans, accusing their bosses of infringing staff’s civil liberties and have threatened strike action.
The identification scheme, being studied by Metronet and Tube Lines, the two private sector consortia in charge of engineering work, would mean every worker having to be fingerprinted and the information kept on a central register.
On clocking-on, a worker would touch a scriin with their finger which would read it and check it.
The exact time would be recorded. Metronet and Tube Lines say the system is for security and safety reasons – to ensure only fully licensed and properly qualified staff gain access to the network.
But it would also eliminate anyone clocking-in for their workmates. A splokesman for Metronet, which employes 5,000 engineers and other workers, said, “We are seeking an easy, foolproof system to identify everyone who is working on our network”.
Bobby Law, London district secretary of the RMT, said: “Not in a million years will we agree to accept this”.
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Evening Standard, 6pm edition, page 18.
Well done Bobby. Now all you have to do is make sure that all of your members and the members of the other unions refuse to enter the NIR, because if you do not, you will all be thumbing into work, play and everything else you do.
And lest we forget a tale about the fragility of these systems. Imagine this happening to the NIR. The entire country would be stopped dead should the card be rolled out like the Nazis want it to be:
Police fingerprint system wiped out
By Paul Waugh Deputy Political Editor, Evening StandardPolice investigations across the country have been crippled by a huge crash in the national fingerprint computer system.
All 43 forces in England and Wales, including the Metropolitan Police, have been hit by the shutdown of the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (Nafis).
The blunder, described by insiders as the biggest ever police IT disaster, means national checks have not been
run on suspected criminals or
evidence at crime scenes. A police memo leaked to the Evening Standard reveals the network collapsed more than a week ago.
Written by Bruce Grant, head of the Met’s Fingerprint Bureau, it states that the meltdown “means that no offender’s identity can be verified”.
The crash is the latest costly IT disaster to hit government departments or agencies. The Tories today demanded a full inquiry and seized on the incident as proof that David Blunkett’s plans for a national ID card system could be wrecked by a computer failure.
The Nafis system, which is run by American computer giant Northrop Grumman, has been the Government’s most prestigious police IT project.
It allows an individual force to check if a fingerprint matches
hundreds of thousands of others. The Standard has learned that the system went offline at
4.30am last Wednesday, plunging into chaos every one of the 43 fingerprint bureaux across the nation.
Several forces were back on the system by last night but some parts of the country are still not connected today.
A Home Office spokeswoman said that while forces could not check prints nationally they could run local checks.
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