I was reading a late-70's paper on computer security recently when I saw that it contains a nice quote about the futility of trying to use biometrics to prevent Sept.11-type attacks, I thought I'd share it with people: When a highway patrolman is sent to his duty, he has to be given the authority to cite traffic violators. This cannot be done explicitly for each violator because at the time that the patrolman is sent to his duty, the traffic violator does not exist, and the identity of the future violators is not known, so that it is impossible to construct individual access rights for the violators at that time. The point is that the patrolman's authority has to do with the behaviour of motorists, not their identity. - Naftaly Minsky, "An Operation-Control Scheme for Authorisation in Computer Systems", International Journal of Computer and Information Sciences, Vol.2, No.2, June 1978, p.157. Peter.