US army amasses biometric data in Afghanistan

Soldiers use fingerprint and iris scans to collect vast amount of data with little oversight from Afghan government

The young man reluctantly proffered his eyeballs and fingertips to an American soldier wielding a hi-tech box resembling an outsize digital camera. As the machine slowly gathered his biometric details, the man looked increasingly ill at ease. Was it because his herd of goats had started to wander off? Or because the device was revealing that he was in some way mixed up with the insurgency? With each iris and fingertip scanned, the device gave the operator a steadily rising percentage chance that the goat herder was on an electronic „watch list“ of suspects. (more on guardian.co.uk)