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US army amasses biometric data in Afghanistan
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. Although it never reached 100%, it was enough for the man to be taken to the nearest US outpost for interrogation.
Since the Guardian witnessed that incident, which occurred near the southern city of Kandahar earlier this year, US soldiers have been dramatically increasing the vast database of biometric information collected from Afghans living in the most wartorn parts of southern and eastern Afghanistan.
The US army now has information on 800,000 people, while another database developed by the country's interior ministry has records on 250,000 people.