About 4 or 5 years ago banks here began requiring fingerprints (just the thumb) to cash a check for you if you didn't have an account at that bank.
you have to get thumbprinted to open a bank account in California.
Or is that not the issue at all, and the U.S. just wants to add prints of your digits to the files where they have prints of my thumb?
i think that's it, honestly. they just want everyone's fingerprints for the central database.
when i was a kid, there was the whole big mid-80s Satanic pedophile conspiracy scare (the whole McMartin preschool hysteria). at that time, the FBI held a series of big mass voluntary fingerprinting events for kids. you know, so that in the event we were kidnapped by the Satanic pedophiles lurking in every corner, the FBI could, umm, track us by our fingerprints or something. i remember my mom lining me up with all the other kids and getting fingerprinted, and how all the adults were talking about how good this was and how much safer we'd be.
i remember how creeped out i was years later when i figured out what was going on, how the government was manipulating an absurd media scare and all that. but at the time, i remember everyone talking about what a good thing it was, which, in and of itself, is creepy.
so, yeah, my fingerprints are on file because the government fed my mom a line of bullshit when i was a kid and she bought it, just like a lot of kids in the US, i would imagine. what a weird place this country is. i would have been fingerprinted by now, anyway, because i have a securities license, and there's all kinds of fingerprinting and background checking that goes on there, but still. |
