As well as the recent problems with public transport schemes, there’s been no small concern about whether biometrics are as secure as our governments tell us. Now The Register tells us that a hacker group in Germany has published the fingerprint of Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s interior minister, and promises that this could be used to fool any fingerprint-based identification system. That’s not why I noticed this article - trust me, there’s going to be a lot more examples of people demonstrating that ID schemes aren’t going to deliver. What stood out from the article was this quote from Karsten Nohl:

The whole research has always been inspired by showing how insecure biometrics are, especially a biometric that you leave all over the place. It’s basically like leaving the password to your computer everywhere you go without you being able to control it anymore.

“It’s like leaving the password to your computer everywhere you go” - I’m going to have that made into a T-shirt. When cast in those terms, it makes me think dark thoughts about how these sorts of systems might be used to commit fraud against relief distributions, where any system would have to skew towards false positives rather than false negatives. I will try to flush these thoughts out in a longer post soon…