Ya gotta love these crafty German hackers and defenders of civil liberties.
Germany's Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has been among those pushing for the same kind of mandatory biometric identity cards our own domestic would-be gauleiters are advocating.
Every issue of the 4000-plus press run of the brand new issue of the Chaos Computer Club's magazine, Die Datenschleuder, has attached to it an unusual bonus--a thin foil reproduction of the print from Schäuble's finger, suitable for gluing, carefully, onto your own digit before filing, say, a visa application!
The article explains in useful detail how this was accomplished. The social engineering aspect was simple--someone grabbed a water glass he had held at a panel discussion and slipped it to the Chaos crew. The technical details are covered in the article by an explanation with helpful diagrams showing how to scan, lift and reproduce the fingerprints of a high government official, to pick an example at random.
This is a breaking story, not yet translated into English to my knowledge, but it shouldn't be long at all. Or check it out in German, purely for the pleasure of reading about the Fingerabdruckattrappe.
It is also a masterpiece of imaginative activist protest, but there's no need to stop there. The possibilities are endless. Why settle for wearing a latex Condi Rice mask while behaving badly at a Halloween party when you can pull off actual burglaries using her fingerprints?
[And a big fat tip of the Hatlo hat to Scott H who hipped me to the story.]
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