At 01:12 PM 11/09/2001 -0800, Greg Broiles wrote:
At 01:10 AM 11/9/2001 +0100, Nomen Nescio wrote:
[...] A few other irrelevant points have been made. Given that ID is not perfectly reliable, do we need to tattoo numbers on people's forearms? This is the fallacy of perfection. ID can be combined with a simple thumbprint for biometric identification (already widely used for cashing checks) and you will raise the cost of forgery considerably.
Bullshit. There's no real-time on-line database of ordinary citizen fingerprints available to match versus ID cards, even if the cards (which don't exist and haven't been issued) were available.
They require the forger to have access to the format used by the fingerprint storage system, not that that's _too_ hard. They also require that a minimum-wage security guard be able to do fingerprint matching, which says that the system needs to be automated and somewhat error-tolerant. Besides, run this sort of scam on the public for very long, and you *will* have a database of fingerprints - not hard to put on line. The main thing it accomplishes is that it somewhat reduces theft of ID cards, and forces people who lose their Internal Passport to keep getting new ones with their own fingerprints or use better fake documentation when they reapply.
The "ID card" fairy tale still loses.