I just picked this up from the god-like archives of the god-like Register. In 2003, a school was planning retinal scans before parting with school dinners and library books.

 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/01/08/uk_school_plans_retinal_scans/

The article says that tens of thousands of kids had already been fingerprinted then. However, a resourceful chap has found there are serious flaws in biometric iD.

“c’t gave biometrics a resounding thumbs down, after fooling a large number of devices with simple tricks and finding some unusable.

In its attempts at outfoxing the protective programs and devices, c’t concentrated on deceiving the systems with the aid of simple procedures (such as the reactivation of latent images) and forgeries, such as silicon fingerprints. It also achieved some success in eavesdropping on the communication (via the USB port) between a computer and the sensor and using this information in replay attacks to fool recognition systems. It didn’t try to hack into biometric data directly, though this might be another fruitful avenue of attack.”

It seesm that we are going to have to rely on the skills of a few eccentric hackers to keep some of the personal freedoms that used to be considered the essential benefit of democracy.

Democracy, hmm? Do you remember seeing anything in the voting materials at the last general or council elections that said

“By the way, we know you think jury trials and a professionally trained  police force and free movement are so 20th century.  We intend to replace the police with low-paid vigilantes wearing armbands and applying civil A-Social Bastard Orders that don’t requiire proof of actually breaking laws.

Oh, and we know you feel that 25 hour surveillance of everyone’s public activities  is the way to go. We are sure you feel uncomfortable when your biological identifiers,  credit record, medical history and address and telephone number and many other details or rumours about you aren’t held all over the place. We know you want these things to be collated at will by anyone with access to them – that is, more or less any public body or private company. 

We know that you are worried about toddlers wearing hoodies and veils, so we’ll make them our big priority.  Just let them try keeping a library book over the allotted 14 days!  We bet that you are furious that people can just walk into pubs without showing a biomentric passport. Well, we promise to sort all that out for you. Vote for us.”