Police fingerprint system wiped out

[emad]

By Paul Waugh Deputy Political Editor, Evening Standard
2 December 2004

Police investigations across the country have been crippled by a huge crash in the national fingerprint computer system.

All 43 forces in England and Wales, including the Metropolitan Police, have been hit by the shutdown of the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (Nafis).

The blunder, described by insiders as the biggest ever police IT disaster, means national checks have not been run on suspected criminals or evidence at crime scenes. A police memo leaked to the Evening Standard reveals the network collapsed more than a week ago.
.........
The Nafis system, which is run by American computer giant Northrop Grumman, has been the Government's most prestigious police IT project.
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/15072873?source=Evening%20Standard
Same US corporation that is bidding to install the UK's new £10 billion Identity Card system?????

[KingChicken]

1. nice, good going...

[elehhhhna]

2. Didja know that the "science" and theories of fingerprinting have

never actually been tested to determine whether they're true (i.e. no one has the same prints, etc.) It's pseudo-scientific.

[Rose Siding]

3. Big trouble for CSI UK

Those CSI shows crack me up. Do people really think that urban govts have the wherewithal to, for instance, do an MRI on a horse to find a bullet, then re-create one to its exact dimensions in some space age contraption? (on last night's version)

Decades of rape kits languish in storage but everyone's lulled into the oh-so-alluring mental coma provided by that old chestnut "someone in charge knows what they're doing and they only want to take care of us"

[SnowGoose]

4. I've seen a cranial blood vessel modeled in that way...

At the University of Iowa. They needed to do something in this guy's brain, so they scanned his head (don't know with what - MRI, Spiral CT, whatever), then took the information to a lab where a device sort of like a 3D printer took the data and gradually built up a very precise model in plastic of the blood vessel.

I have no idea how common that is, but this was at least 5 years ago now.

[grasswire]

5. good news for UK dissidents

the biggest obstacle toward maintenance of a free society is the storage of biometrics by a government that might not always be benevolent. I'm sure this glitch was received with some measure of glee by activists.

[rodeodance]

6. said that this happened a week ago. uummm..