You'll thank me for this one day, Tompkins

The excellent ARCH blog points us (sort of) to a worrying story from York. Schools there are taking children's fingerprints and using them to issue books from their libraries.

Depressing but not new, you say.

But what is new is one of the arguments used to defend the procedure:

Chris Bridge, head teacher at Huntington Secondary, said the system was preparing pupils for a world in which terrorism was rife, and their privacy would be further invaded.

He said: "These children, frankly, are growing up in a world where identity and being certain about your own identity is increasingly important.

"All the measures to do with ID cards will possibly invade their privacy even further, but the world has no answer to terrorism without using these things and I would see us as getting them ready for the world in which they will have to live."