BA to fingerprint domestic passengers

[Roland Perry]

>From their latest newsletter about Terminal 5 at Heathrow:

        "To allow both international and UK domestic customers at
        Terminal 5 to enjoy the wonderful array of shops and restaurants
        on the concourses, there is now a new biometric check for
        domestic customers. Quick and safe, your fingerprints will be
        scanned electronically at Security and then again as you board.
        After this, all records are deleted, so you don't need to worry
        about them being kept on file."

Which raises more questions than it answers. I'm struggling to
understand the model here (although it presumably will all become clear
when it starts working).

1) What if I'm a domestic passenger and don't want to use the shops and
    restaurants - is there a bypass lane straight to the domestic gates?

2) What's special at T5 - domestic and international passengers mingle
    freely in the shops and bars at East Midlands Airport

3) Why fingerprint just domestic passengers - surely all passengers have
    to provide photo ID?

4) If this is a scheme to identify domestic passengers with sub-standard
    photo ID, surely the objective would be to stop a passenger who had
    bought a domestic ticket and gone airside with reduced credentials
    from boarding an *International* flight (whose boarding pass he had
    secreted about his person earlier). So this is backwards - what you
    need to do is fingerprint the international passengers.

5) All records are deleted. Yes, of course they are (BA don't say when,
    "after" could be much longer than 5 min after the plane departs).
-- 
Roland Perry