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The Indefinite Article.

Sunday, May 08, 2005

Hand Your Keys Over to the Covernment

I've never been really big on biometric computer passwords. There was that guy in Japan who was able to fake fingerprints, the extra hardware and software didn't appeal to me. The below blog p0st notices that the Texas Department of Public Safety has been essentially collecting people's biometric passwords for years. At first I thought, WTF? Then I realized, well, the thumbprint and picture kinda serves as a long term biometric password for that critical identity document, the driver's license. Texas is unlike the state of affairs when I was a kid in Louisiana, where you could walk in to any drivers license office with anyones birth certificate, a couple check stubs, and a semi-convincing story and immediately walk out with a state ID with that person's name on it. Biometric passwording for a drivers licenses seems like a pretty good idea, even if it eliminates it for use in personal computers.

Grits for Breakfast: HB 2337: No warrant for police to get personal biometric computer passwords

posted by Adolph at 10:10 AM

1 Comments:

  • Except they're still rolling out biometric passwords for personal computers, so you get all the security risks and only marginal benefits. IMO, biometrics are a bad identifier because they're TOO unique - if they're stolen, they can't be replaced. That's also an argument for not aggregating drivers biometric data in one place.

    By Blogger Gritsforbreakfast, at 9:43 AM  

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