Norwegian citizens now required by law to give their fingerprint to the police

5 days ago, the Norwegian Parliament decided, unanimously, that all citizens of Norway, no matter if they are suspected of something criminal or not, are required to give fingerprints to the police (vote details from Holder de ord). The law make it sound like it will be optional, but in a few years there will be no option any more. The ID will be required to vote, to get a bank account, a bank card, to change address on the post office, to receive an electronic ID or to get a drivers license and many other tasks required to function in Norway. The banks plan to stop providing their own ID on the bank cards when this new national ID is introduced, and the national road authorities plan to change the drivers license to no longer be usable as identity cards. In effect, to function as a citizen in Norway a national ID card will be required, and to get it one need to provide the fingerprints to the police.

In addition to handing the fingerprint to the police (which promised to not make a copy of the fingerprint image at that point in time, but say nothing about doing it later), a picture of the fingerprint will be stored on the RFID chip, along with a picture of the face and other information about the person. Some of the information will be encrypted, but the encryption will be the same system as currently used in the passports. The codes to decrypt will be available to a lot of government offices and their suppliers around the globe, but for those that do not know anyone in those circles it is good to know that the encryption is already broken. And they can be read from 70 meters away. This can be mitigated a bit by keeping it in a Faraday cage (metal box or metal wire container), but one will be required to take it out of there often enough to expose ones private and personal information to a lot of people that have no business getting access to that information.

The new Norwegian national IDs are a vehicle for identity theft, and I feel sorry for us all having politicians accepting such invasion of privacy without any objections. So are the Norwegian passports, but it has been possible to function in Norway without those so far. That option is going away with the passing of the new law. In this, I envy the Germans, because for them it is optional how much biometric information is stored in their national ID.

And if forced collection of fingerprints was not bad enough, the information collected in the national ID card register can be handed over to foreign intelligence services and police authorities, "when extradition is not considered disproportionate".

Update 2015-05-12: For those unable to believe that the Parliament really could make such decision, I wrote a summary of the sources I have for concluding the way I do (Norwegian Only, as the sources are all in Norwegian).