I served a customer on Sunday morning who had managed to enter her card PIN incorrectly when paying for her shopping. She blamed it on jet lag, as she'd just flown home from Orlando International Airport. I couldn't resist: I had to ask her whether the insanity was still going on, and she replied that not only was she fingerprinted but they also took a fucking retinal scan. The jet lag from the flight home, plus the humiliation of being treated like a potential terrorist on the way in, was compounded by the fact that her airline had managed to lose one of her bags at London Gatwick Airport on the way in.
Regular readers will know that since this program was announced, I have refused and will continue to refuse to spend or even accept a single penny to travel back to the United States, as long as I have to be subjected to the scans a suspect in a crime is forced to undergo - hell, I doubt that even the retinas of many criminal suspects are scanned - in the full knowledge that my biometric data will be stored on a myriad of Government servers, some of which I am unaware even exist, for up to a hundred years (although I notice that the Department of Homeland Security's web site has conveniently removed this fact since I last brought it up). I am yet to be convinced that the system has worked at all.
