"If anyone worships the beast and his image and receives his mark on the forehead or on the hand he...will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment rises for ever and ever. "

So - when i'm being incinerated, naked, in hell for eternity, screaming and writhing, with my tackle jiggling as my skin sloughs away and my eyeballs bubble, the holy angels and the lamb will be WATCHING???

But I'm a stall man...

 In Georgia they are called Satan's Ridges.

No matter who goes to bat for her, she will fail. The police will not stand for having one of their most successful and scientific methods being thrown out the window, which is exactly what would happen if the suit were successful. There is no rational reason to not submit for fingerprinting, and plenty of reasons why it's a good idea. Even if the judge is religiously stupid, it'll get nuked on appeal. I see it as a good thing. It'll set one more precedent in the courts against religion. So ironic that by desperately searching for ways to force religion on people, they're actually crippling themselves suit by suit.

  As an atheist I find the religious nature of her objection hard to take but she obviously has the right to her own opinion.  Nevertheless as a person who tends to support libertarian politics I do see the School Board as being excessively vigilant.

  My current understanding of the situation is that School Boards across the nation resort to tactics such as this in order to protect themselves from liability in the event of accusations of sexual impropriety between an employee and their students.  The intrusive background check is simply an ass-saving measure for the School Board, most likely predicated on the advice of their attorneys.

  She may prevail but I doubt it.

  Agreed.  Bad laws abound.  ( can you say Patriot Act.  ? )

Why is everyone so supportive of not having to give fingerprints? If having a database of the populations fingerprints could help catch criminals, I would support it. Is everyone scared of big brother tracking them?

What confuses me is how she has gotten to her age without ever having her fingerprints taken. I have had mine taken many times, when applying for ID, passport, licenses

and have done for more than 20 years and there's a lot of this gear available but its penetration into the market is almost zero. The number of companies which have gone under trying to survive on income from biometrics is legion.

People don't like biometrics and that's flat. I think a viable alternative is a biometric (it's no more than a bunch of numbers that indicate distances between selected grid points) that is stored on a credential that you carry - like a smart card.

Instead of an access control system containing a database that could be accessed widely (very arguably, let's face it), the reader simply matches the cardholder to the measurements on their credential. A system like this is an excellent compromise.

Nevertheless, end users have a lot of trouble selling biometrics to their staff. There's the fingerprint thing, the number of the beast thing, the everything. We have clients who make this stuff but even given that I understand it, I am not a great fan.

I don't think anyone should have to give a fingerprint unless security is a big concern. The lady should be allowed to carry a prox or mifare swipe card instead - it's just a school after all. I think you'll find the school is less interested in the 

increased security levels of biometrics and more interested in saving money on managing physical cards. The cost of administering thousands of cards that get lost, stolen, broken, is a serious expense. Fingers are wholly maintained by their owners.

It's generally feared that there's a network of computer systems out there that are all talking to each other and sharing this sort of information but I can assure you no security manager worth his salt would expose a quality networked access control or video

surveillance system to a general data network.  In almost all cases these systems run on subnets that are physically corralled apart from wider networks and access is controlled by direct connection to a handful of authorised local workstations.

If there was some freaky biometric sharing arrangement between multiple corporate and government bodies on a wide scale I would have heard about it. I never have and I've examined hundreds of security management systems.

Having said all this, the technical capacity for the number of the beast not only exists, it has done for say, ten years. Maybe the general biometric capability has been around longer than this but the network infrastructure has always been inadequate. 

Part of me thinks Osama's biggest 9/11 achievement is the increased penetration of identity management solutions, particularly in customs environments, in the West. You would have had have to assaulted America and beat the living shit out of her to

implement this stuff ten years ago and now the DHS and its global equivalents are serving it up with coffee and 2 sugars. Creepy.

Biometrics should come down to choice. That's what I'd want.

"I, myself, believe I have nothing to hide, but I will fight tooth and nail ANYONE that tries to take my fingerprints to record.  I will also have a lawyer present BEFORE anyone tries to search my house, my person or anything that I have any influence over.  I will, however, submit to these things only if proven to me and my lawyer if there is a reasonable amount of evidence pointing toward my guilt in a real crime."

So will I (except fingerprints, we don't live in the USSR or Nazi Germany). But I don't see any record keeping taking place here. Merely an insurance that a criminal isn't in the class room. If something turns up, then her prints were ALREADY on record, the police just didn't know who they belonged to. It's nothing more sinister than a name check or a credit check or a criminal record check, which are more common practice than fingerprint checks.

But these kinds of background checks don't compare your fingerprints to those on file. They just keep your finger prints for some later use. I don't even know what that later use could be, but that is the reason for taking them: to keep them on record and not compare them to the fingerprints of criminals. They don't bother with the comparison because of the extremely high likelihood of false positives. There is nothing to gain by having them have your fingerprints during a background check. They aren't doing a comparison, so they are just taking fingerprints for the sake of taking fingerprints. I guess it is some sort of liability thing like the way one of my previous employers demanded two letters of recommendation, never even opened them the whole time I worked there, and kept the letters in a file. I can't understand the utility of collecting letters like that if they aren't going to be read (just like collecting fingerprints that won't be ran through criminal records), but I suppose that there is some liability based reason for having letters of recommendation on hand for every employee.

Like one of the previous posters (Atheistextremeist) I have a background in security (career prior to present career), though more in the crypto / trusted computing area than biometrics.  I forget the first time my prints were taken (ca. 1980 or so), but I always assumed they were taken to make sure I'd not lied about who I am.  Which makes me wonder how true what you wrote is, because if they aren't taking prints to verify identity, then why the hell bother?  On account of I know the FBI and others have my prints, I don't complain about having them taken -- add 'em to the collection, I figure.

What I don't understand is how the woman in question is making this into a religious liberty issue.  There are an infinite number of behaviors ("Aardvark Animation" -- my religion requires me to make animated cartoons of aardvarks ... ) that can be claimed as "religious liberty issues", many of which are incompatible with varying national (for varying values of "national" ) laws.  So merely claiming "religious liberty" is not a strong argument.  I'd think she'd have to find an established religious doctrine which teaches that "finger printing" is contrary to religious liberty as a first hurdle.

And I disagree with the logic about "not opening" letters of recommendation, or "not checking" fingerprints as a liability reducing mechanism.  Not something I'd want coming out during pre-trial discovery if I were being sued and hadn't done Due Diligence.

Legally, "It's a wacky belief" isn't sufficient reason NOT to retain her as a teacher.  There has to be a legitimate state interest (which is starting to sound questionable, if the State isn't using the fingerprints at all) when there is a religious liberty issue that conflicts with the law.  Bad cases make for bad laws, and if the school districts aren't performing background checks with the fingerprints, this case could wind up making that impossible.

Well how is it decided what rituals can't you or must you perform for your religion? Would the law require a text and congregation? If she followed some of the guidelines but not all of them, would it make her whole argument invalid? ie. She won't have "the mark of the beast", but she will poop in a public place (dumb example of something she isn't supposed to do in accordance to her religion but does anyway)