Your Eyeballs, Please.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: McCarthyism Watch - Viewpoint essay

Big Brother wants your irises. George Bush just issued a directive to expand the acquisition of biometric information, and to ensure that agencies across the executive branch share it.

And the Bush Administration may give it to foreign governments, too.

All this according to National Security Presidential Directive Number 59, also known as Homeland Security Presidential Directive Number 24, which George W. Bush signed on June 5.

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The directive is aimed at "known and suspected terrorists," as well as "other persons who may pose a threat to national security."

The directive does not say how these other persons who "may pose a threat" are to be defined.

And the directive is so broadly worded that it appears to cover anyone whose biometric or other personal data the government has collected.

"To be most effective, national security identification and screening systems will require timely access to the most accurate and most complete biometric, biographic, and related data that are, or can be, made available throughout the executive branch," the document states.

Bush ordered executive departments and agencies to "use mutually compatible methods and procedures in the collection, storage, use, analysis, and sharing of biometric and associated biographic and contextual information of individuals." Agencies are supposed to share this information with each other "to the fullest extent permitted by law" whenever "there is an articulable and reasonable basis for suspicion" that an individual poses a "threat to national security."

The directive does not specify what an "articulable and reasonable basis" might be.

"Known and suspected terrorists," or KSTs, as the document calls them, are not the only concern of the Bush Administration.

It has whole groups of other people that it wants to gather biometric information on.

Within ninety days, the Attorney General is tasked to "recommend categories of individuals in addition to KSTs who may pose a threat to national security," and he is ordered to "set forth cost-effective actions and associated timelines for expanding the collection and use of biometrics to identify and screen...