The door to scrutiny of fingerprinting was opened by two United States Supreme Court decisions that changed the rules governing expert testimony.
Bronwyn E. Bruton, a democracy and governing expert who wrote a provocative essay published by the Council on Foreign Relations urging the West to withdraw from Somalia, said it was "utterly unsurprising that Kenya and/or Ethiopia would want to get in on the act".
There has long been a conflict between governing by experts and democracy.
Some kind of shift was inevitable in the transition from politics to governing, political experts say.
Tony Travers, the distinguished London School of Economics local government expert, wrote a book about politics in the capital, subtitled Governing An Ungovernable City.
For four millennia, and well into the 1950s, medical practice had been governed by expert opinion, and treatments were at best placebos, pharmacologically inert substances, or at worst filled the cemeteries.
And they called on Google to be clearer about the rules governing AdWords, which experts liken to a "black box .Given all this, the EU is justified in shining a light on Google's activities.
Plenty of laws and court precedents govern leases, but experts are unsure how the Sept. 11 catastrophe will affect the rules now.
Thus, in their original design, a government rooted in popular sovereignty would delegate authority to an unelected Supreme Court, an indirectly elected Senate (elected then by state legislatures), a selected electoral college to "enlarge the views" of the public in choosing a president and, later, a central bank governed by appointed experts insulated from politics.
