Last week I had to go to my local INS office to get fingerprinted (part of the green card process is getting your fingerprints OK'ed by the FBI (and also presumably stored for future reference)). The process is computerised, with a low-res scan of all the fingers taken once, and then each finger is individually rolled and scanned on a much higher resolution scanner.
The process took about 20-30 minutes; each finger had to be wiped with some cleaning fluid, the glass on top of the scanner also had to be wiped between scans, and a fingerprinting technician had to roll each of my fingers with the right amount of pressure to get a clear image of the fingerprint. Even with immediate feedback on a large screen showing the fingerprint and how good the scan was, some fingers took as many as five tries to get an acceptable fingerprint. Now, this was a special-built device whose only purpose is to scan fingerprints, operated under ideal conditions by a trained technician. Draw your own conclusions about the effectiveness of mass-produced fingerprint scanners that would be integrated in other devices. /ji -- /\ ASCII ribbon | John "JI" Ioannidis * Secure Systems Research Department \/ campaign | AT&T Labs - Research * Florham Park, NJ 07932 * USA /\ against | "Intellectuals trying to out-intellectual / \ HTML email. | other intellectuals" (Fritz the Cat) --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
