The FBI and senior British officials are discussing the possibility of sharing information contained within the British ID database in yet another attempt to track down terrorists and major criminals.

The US-initiated programme, “Server in the Sky”, would take cooperation between the police forces way beyond the current faxing of fingerprints across the Atlantic. Allies in the “war against terror” – the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – have formed a working group, the International Information Consortium, to plan their strategy.

Biometric measurements, irises or palm prints as well as fingerprints, and other personal information are likely to be exchanged across the network. One section will feature the world’s most wanted suspects. The database could hold details of millions of criminals and suspects.

Details on criminals and suspects.  It should be understood that anyone can be considered a suspect and, once in this database, the information contained on individuals will not be removed. Considering the debacle of lost databases the British suffered last year, is it really a wise idea to be instantly handing over such sensitive information to foreign governments?

Britain’s National Policing Improvement Agency has been the lead body for the FBI project because it is responsible for IDENT1, the UK database holding 7m sets of fingerprints and other biometric details used by police forces to search for matches from scenes of crimes. Many of the prints are either from a person with no criminal record, or have yet to be matched to a named individual.

Your fingerprints could already be in their database, especially since it is common to collect all fingerprints at the scene of a crime.  It does not matter whether or not the fingerprints are from the innocent or the guilty.  All prints go into the database forever.

The FBI is proposing to establish three categories of suspects in the shared system: “internationally recognised terrorists and felons”, those who are “major felons and suspected terrorists”, and finally those who the subjects of terrorist investigations or criminals with international links. Tom Bush, assistant director at the FBI’s criminal justice information service, has said he hopes to see a pilot project for the programme up and running by the middle of the year.

If you believe this statement, then your personal information will never be accidentally mixed in with terrorists and your life will continue to run as smoothly as it has ever been.  If not, this is just another warning in a long line of ever increasingly scary tactics from governments who were supposed to be looking after our best interests.