Excerpts from this BBC article, The card aiming to end Nigeria's fraud problem www.bbc.com/news/technology-31438226 Last year, the National Electronic Identity (e-ID) Card was launched in collaboration with MasterCard, with President Goodluck Jonathan the first recipient... The smart card's Match-On-Card technology matches a holder's fingerprint against a profile stored in the embedded chip... The card is also a travel document, conforming to the same standards as international passports. It contains electronic identification information, as well as Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technology that allows for document signing, non-repudiation and encryption. The eID card contains users' biometric data, including fingerprints... Fully 70% of adult Nigerians do not have a formal bank account... again bring up the tradeoffs between all-in-one functionality versus segregation of duties. I personally don't want one technology to rule them all, but I have many choices and I know how to make them. Others, not so much. Has anyone here been involved in design, rollout, or analysis of the Nigerian solution and want to comment on how risk management tradeoffs were evaluated? To me (the guy living in a world of choice), I don't want to be 0wned at all but, more than that, I don't want to be 0wned by one central entity even if its mission statement is to do so for my own good (cf., "I can't defend the country until I'm into all the networks." -- K. Alexander and/or cradle to grave tracking of everything in the food pipeline and/or Elon Musk's comment that it will soon be illegal to drive your own car yourself). But let's start with Nigeria, unless some one of you is better able to discuss Pakistan's new program that requires a fingerprint to get a SIM card. theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/03/pakistan-fingerprint-mobile-phone-users --dan "The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. it is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists." G.K. Chesterton, _Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State_