Government ID, Smart Cards, Identification and Authentication

UK biometric ID system lacking necessary hardware

Friday, February 6, 2009

Although the United Kingdom has moved forward with issuing ID cards containing facial and fingerprint biometric information to their citizens, the country hasn’t installed any readers for those cards at any border station or law enforcement agency, according to a Daily Tech article. Many of the card program’s early opposition are angered by the news referring to the program as a waste of money.


There is no timetable set for the installation of card readers, but there is a growing worry that their deployment will end up costing UK citizens more money on top of the original set for the program. Officials from the Identity and Passport service have acknowledged that as the number of biometric ID cards issued to UK citizens grows, they expect to have the number of readers deployed to grow as well.

Read the full story here [end] 

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The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is looking for proposals for research projects that could yield new biometric systems that authenticate users based on their own unique movements or behaviors such as the way they type or move a mouse, according to a ZDNet article.

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