Biometrics – IPS, the Flat Earth Society and transformational cosmology

10 Messrs Mansfield and Rejman-Greene note in their report that there are exceptional problems with flat print fingerprinting (Appendix B, p.34). It is obviously hard to enrol people onto the population register if they are missing fingers and/or entire hands. It can also be hard to register older people, they say, manual labourers, East Asians and – that other unimportant minority group – ... women.

IPS have never explained what alternative arrangements will be made for these cases and the NIST report doesn't consider them. We remain in the dark, therefore, but IPS can't stay silent on the issue forever and when they do propose their alternative arrangements, the question will arise why we can't all use those alternatives and forget about biometrics altogether.