Watching the Watchers: Mexico’s Surveillance State Is a Bad Omen for Privacy Everywhere

We’ve recently reported on how Mexico is managing to surpass even the expansive surveillance state ambitions of Washington, D.C.

Mexico has passed laws that require every person to enroll in biometric ID systems that must now be presented for any significant transactions in banking, schooling, social services, and health care. This data, in turn, is fed into a “Central Intelligence Program” that can be accessed by civil and military forces.

An update by Karen Gullo at EFF shows just how Orwellian the new system actually is:

“The Mexican government passed a package of outrageously privacy-invasive laws in July that gives both civil and military law enforcement forces access to troves of personal data and forces every individual to turn over biometric information regardless of any suspicion of crime.   

“The laws create a new interconnected intelligence system dubbed the Central Intelligence Platform, under which intelligence and security agencies at all levels of government – federal, state and municipal – have the power to access, from any entity public or private, personal information for ‘intelligence purposes,’ including license plate numbers, biometric information, telephone details that allow the identification of individuals, financial, banking, and health records, public and private property records, tax data, and more. 

“You read that right. Banks’ customer information databases? Straight into the platform. Hospital patient records? Same thing …”

Of course, a Mexican citizen can opt out, provided they are willing to live off the grid without a bank account, healthcare, children in school, or much of anything else.

Mexico’s turn from a multi-party democracy to a state dominated by one party – the Morena Party – makes this collectivization of biometric data even more problematic. As Washington toys with the idea of a national ID, which would have to be based on biometrics to be effective, the uses and abuses of such a database south of the border should be top of mind.

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