"Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> writes:

...

Or to people with access to scanning microscopy techniques like STMs or AFMs. I suspect that there are lots of techniques that can be successfully used. It used to be that using them required the sort of facilities only available at a large semiconductor manufacturer, but now I suspect that it would be easy for a student at a major university, and probably less easy, but still perfectly feasible, for a person working at home with lots of sophisticated but fairly available equipment like STMs.

The proof would be in the pudding, would it not? Are their documented cases of smartcard scavenging?