With homeland security as a hot topic, these days, LaserCard in Mountain View (NASDAQ: LCRD, formerly known as Drexler Technologies) quietly continues to ship millions of unique memory cards as the foundation for “Green” cards and National ID cards to US, Italian, and Canadian governments and others.
In addition to its incredible resistance against wear and tear (we punched holes in it, and it still read successfully) and unique security features, the LaserCard stores an impressive 2.8M of personal and biometric data. Fingerprints, retina scans, voice encoding or whatever in the future becomes the standard set of biometric verifiers, can be combined with visual authentication to ensure the holder of the card is indeed the one presenting himself. All these attributes can be stored on the card and read offline without the need for centralized databases.
So, why is homeland security not using this card to its fullest potential? Why does it waste time on privacy debates with regards to centralized storage? Why, four years after 911 are we still not able to verify a person’s real identity?
