This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 4th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown. The

FBI is moving toward collecting and keeping biometric data on millions of Americans.

The Bureau may also be planning to offer to tell your employer

when you have a brush with the law.

Biometric data has limited uses, according to Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute says biometric data does little

to protect us from terrorism where the key weapon is the element of surprise.

Biometrics, as the as the word suggests are measurements of living forms so so

biometrics provide the key tie between an individual and

it's in databases or on a driver's license or whatever it may be.

So, biometrics are the basic process.

Most people use the word biometrics to refer to machine biometrics. Now we use

biometrics all the time when we look at other people and recognize them. We're basically taking

the measure of their faces and the way they walk and carry themselves.

But when people say biometrics today,

they usually mean machine or digital biometrics,

where some device will take the measure of people.

Biometrics are the basic thing that connects people to information about themselves.

Now the FBI has recently announced its plan to develop a massive biometric database.

It already has a huge database of fingerprints, 55 million of them, which is biometric

data that gets checked against requests all around the country a hundred thousand times a day.

Have there been any problems with that database?

Well, I'm not aware of problems.

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