One of the principal reasons why civil liberties advocates try to sound the alarm about emerging technology is that it can very quickly progress from dystopian scenarios only found in science fiction, to elective consumer adoption in the name of efficiency, to commonsense security measures, to governments surreptitiously using it for surveillance and ID, and on to the final phase of mandatory requirement by centralized government. Biometrics is a case in point.

The prevalence of biometrics has increased in a few short years to become entrenched in everything from banking, to drones, to student IDs, to facial recognition billboards, to voice recognition security . . . and we are now beginning to witness various governments impose biometrics upon their citizens, essentially as a requirement to even be a citizen.

The writing has been on the wall for some time. Supposedly democratic countries like Japan and India have both been rolling out progressively larger biometric ID programs. In Japan's case, it already has a mandatory component to enroll for the collection and sharing of personally identifying information. In 2012 India revealed the scope of its biometric database plan that intends to encompass all 1.2 billion residents. It was being sold as a method of protecting the population from corruption and preventing identity theft and welfare fraud. As it stands today, it remains a massive project that is still in an elective phase, but many have warned about the growing connection to banking and general identification that will eventually make it exceedingly difficult to opt-out of.

The plan to put 1.2 billion people into a single database easily quelled the voices of those who never imagined that a country even the size of the U.S. could be so centrally managed. But, now, nearly all major countries have attempted some type of centralized identification system with various levels of success based on pushback from citizenry. The list of countries who have made it mandatory include Argentina, Belgium, Colombia, Germany, Italy, Peru, and Spain.

In fact, the United States has become the focus of a recent uproar about its nationwide biometric database. The Next Generation Identification Biometrics Database went live in 2014 with most people completely unaware, and even those who were aware understood it to be limited to border control. Subsequent revelations, however, have shown that it has evolved into something more encompassing, including tens of millions of records from criminals and non-criminals such as:

suspects and detainees

fingerprints for job applicants

licenses

military or volunteer service

background checks

security clearances

naturalization

Worst of all, the FBI has been fighting to keep the full details secret from the public. Now U.S. citizens are left only to speculate if biometric identification will become mandatory in the near future.

Another ominous sign of the added potential for making biometric ID mandatory is coming from long-time U.S. cohort, Israel.