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Biometrics Are Making Espionage Harder
schwit1 sends this story from Foreign Policy: In the age of iris scans and facial recognition software, biometrics experts like to point out: The eyes don't lie. And that has made tradecraft all the more difficult for U.S. spies. After billions of dollars of investment — largely by the U.S. government — the routine collection and analysis of fingerprints, iris scans, and facial images are helping to ferret out terrorists and immigration fraudsters all over the world. But it has also made it harder for undercover agents to remain anonymous.
Gone are the days of entering a country with a false passport and wearing a wig and a mustache to hide your true identity. Once an iris scan is on record, it becomes nearly impossible to evade detection. 'In the 21st century, you can't do any of that because of biometrics,' said retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Gone are the days of entering a country with a false passport and wearing a wig and a mustache to hide your true identity. Once an iris scan is on record, it becomes nearly impossible to evade detection. 'In the 21st century, you can't do any of that because of biometrics,' said retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Because it sounds like you're placing nearly absolute confidence in a solution where a back-end server storing biometric template data is one compromise away from being used to make all your efforts completely useless. Gone are the days when someone intent on espionage needed a wig and fake mustache; now they can compromise your back-end server, overwrite some template data, and become a whole other person that you firmly believe should be trusted and provided all kinds of privileged access.
What you've done is come up with a system where the good guys can't change the passwords, but the bad guys can. It's among the dumbest ideas ever.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
So the contact lenses with the fake iris prints don't work?
No they don't. A real iris pulses slightly as your heart beats. A biometric sensor can detect that.
You are a bad country if you were doing it that way. Most spies are not registerd as such. They are people who have a job in an other country and do the spying on the side.
Crossing borders is not an issue. And if they are recognised as spies, they are burned and will not be used again.
FYI, James Bond is fiction.
And even if they would want to get into a country, they can. Look at people illegaly smuggeling others and succeed. Now imagine that you somehow make those illegal people legal.
And they could even give you a new passport. Happens all the time. New passport, ID and what not.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Daily Caller? James O'Keefe? Not the most reliable sources. Also: immigration fraud is different from sneaking across the border: (http://www.ag.ny.gov/feature/immigration-services-fraud). These are the people who prey on immigrants, not the immigrants themselves.