From this summer, European travellers to the U.S. will face even more affronts to their civil liberties when new regulations designed to combat terrorism come into effect.

In a deal between the European Union and the Department of Homeland Security, travellers will now be forced to have all ten of their fingers scanned, an increase from the current two. These prints will then be entered into a national database alongside those of criminals, where they will be cross-referenced with fingerprints found on various items across the world, in an attempt to see if the person in question had visited any places the U.S. government thought they shouldn’t have.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was — unsurprisingly — singing the program’s praises this week, calling it a “quantum step forward in security” (sadly not understanding his own metaphor). He also spoke, as proponents of such invasive systems so often do, of how the system would combat terrorism:

“It also creates a powerful deterrent for anybody who has ever spent time sitting in a training camp, or building a bomb in a safe house, or carrying out a terrorist mission on a battlefield.”

A noble aim, for sure: who wouldn’t want to strike fear into the hearts of such people? The problem is the fact that such measures so frequently extend far beyond targetting terrorists and other criminals: they are turned against the ordinary, law-abiding public. Not a paranoid thought at all — take the National Security Agency’s monitoring of call records, for example, or the Department of Justice tracking your movements without probable cause.

Such fears are echoed by many groups fighting for the privacy of ordinary citizens. UK civil liberties group Liberty issued a statement this week thoroughly denouncing the “intrusive and unwieldy” system and the creation of a “database of innocent people”; director Shami Chakrabarti said:

“This must be the Keystone Cops school of border control . . . accumulating the fingerprints of millions of innocent passengers will not deter would-be suicide bombers.”

Privacy groups were also joined by security experts in questioning the effectiveness of the plan. Simon Davies, head of Privacy International, commented that the program would “turn thousands of law-abiding British travellers into terrorist suspects” and that airport queues would increase dramatically as airport staff struggled with the extra workload.

The physical system itself has also been brought under scrutiny, particularly following a recent Japanese report in which researchers were able to fool 11 out of 15 tested fingerprinting systems with a simple, difficult-to-detect latex strip covering the fingers. Many security experts fear that the system will be easy to fool for those who need to fool it — the sort of people the system ostensibly keeps out.

So, we have an intrusive, easily-fooled system which permanently stores the data of all people — innocent or guilty — who pass through it, a system whose only success will be to force terrorists to be slightly more careful. As Chertoff himself states:

“We will have a world in which any terrorist who has ever been in a safe house or has ever been in a training camp is going to ask himself or herself this question: have I ever left a fingerprint anywhere?”

A system which terrorists can defeat simply by wearing gloves in their training camps, or by wearing a simple latex strip over their fingers when they are scanned, or by entering the country by other means, but nevertheless stores intimate, private data on hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens? No, Mr. Chertoff, this is not a “powerful deterrent”, nor will it force terrorists to change their methods or abandon the country altogether; it will simply serve to inconvenience innocent citizens at a huge cost to their privacy, which seems to me hardly something to celebrate.