‘Datenschleuder‘, the magazine of the Chaos Computer Club, is providing its readers with a foil with the fingerprint of the German minister of the interior, Wolfgang Schäuble. Simply stick the flexible flap over your finger, and as far as the fingerprint readers are concerned, you are him. Need more: simply apply some wood-glue to the included plastic foil negative to make new flaps.
The interior ministry, in a reaction, has said it would not exclude the possibility of legal steps against the CCC. So they take all of our fingerprints for the new biometric database, and that is just fine. We take one of theirs and they’re all upset.
The CCC is looking for fingerprints of a number of many named individuals, for their ‘biometric collection booklet’.
Funny, Schneier states in one of his recent blog postings that privacy is a matter of balance of power. CCC has understood this and shifted the balance a bit more towards ‘the people’.