that the biggest ever loss of personal ID data in one go has just happened : a laptop containing 55 million records of sensitive, personal data was somehow forgotten in an unmarked taxi.
But nothing to worry about, the disk was password-protected at the BIOS level, right ?
Right.

This is wonderful! When the US introduced fingerprinting for innocent foreigners who entered the US, nobody in the US complained. When the US pushed for more fingerprinting outside the US, like in the EU, nobody in the US complained. Now US citizens get the same treatment. I LOVE IT!

"This requires us to ensure that any biometric system is tested thoroughly before, during and after deployment. One of the most important things to test is the ability to correctly identify fingerprints," it said.

They don't need to do this: the FBI can tell them the answer - they've been using this dataset of professionally-taken rolled prints for years. What the Hopeless Office needs to test is whether they can identify people based on prints taken by a poorly-trained travel agent slapping your hand on a scanner (which is how enrollment on the NIS is going to happen in a lot of cases).


The IAFIS system contains all fingerprints collected by the FBI including everybody who has ever held a security clearance and presumably everyone who has been printed on entry to the US under recent unpatriotic policy changes.

As a clearance holder - and an early engineer on the IAFIS program in the 90s - I am extremely concerned that this data-sharing has potentially violated the terms of the SF-86 form which contains a very comprehensive set of protections for any personal information disclosed as part of the investigative process.

Surely to properly test the system they are going to need lots of American crims walking about sticking their fingers and eyeballs onto scanners?!

Otherwise all they'll be doing is checking their database can store lots of stuff (whoopy doo!).