Fingerprints and feature creep
After all the pre-legislative assurances that Britain’s biometric ID card was “a bulwark against the surveillance society“, Tony Blair has shown such promises to be a mockery. So, no surprises there, then.
In an email to 28,000 people who signed an online petition demanding the government drop its plan for ID cards, Blair explains why he is ignoring their wishes and ploughing ahead regardless - with both a National Identity Register and an “unclonable” smartcard.
None of that is new. The new bit is Blair’s admission that the police hope to crack unsolved crimes using the NIR’s fingerprint data. This, Blair confesses, will be compared with “the fingerprints found at the scene of some 900,000 unsolved crimes”.
But there’s an elephant in the forensics room. As New Scientist has recounted before, fingerprints have never been validated as an entirely reliable biometric. On top of that, the ways in which different people match them […]
Original post by http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2007/02/fingerprints-and-feature-creep.html