Just finished 'The Infernal Machine' by Larry Hannant. It is a history of security screening in canada, focusing on the period from the early 1920s through the end of world war 2. Mass fingerprinting for security purposes in Canada began, not as is commonly supposed, with a spy case after the end of the second world war, but in the early 20s, as a means of catching, tracking, and harrassing communists. The system expanded from there without public debate or acknowledgement, through Canadas entry to the second world war. Although fingerprinting legally was only permissable in the case of people charged with felonies, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police fingerprinted Communists and other undesirables, who they picked up for vagrancy or drunkeness. The RCMP was aware that this was a violation of Canadian law. At the start of ww2, again without public discussion or debate, the system was expanded to cover workers in many military industries. It was only in 1948 that the government acknowledged what was going on, by giving a stamp of approval to a system already in place. The book traces the ties between the RCMP, MI5 and the FBI in the context of security screening. Cypherpunk relevancies include the RCMP fear of anonymity, the expansion of government power unchecked to harrass those with unpopular and subversive views, and the mechanics of building systems for tracking millions of fingerprints (with custom Hollerith card sorters that IBM designed for the purpose.) I found it interesting and worth the time to read. 1995, University of Toronto Press, isbn 0-8020-0448-2 (cloth) or 0-8020-7236-4 (paper). $9 in a used bookstore. (A rant is waiting to be written over the lack of useful standards in creating ISBNs. Is there a good reason not to have x-y-z-1 not be the cloth, and x-y-z-2 be the paper edition? (Or some other obvious relation...)) -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume