I went to a biometrics conference a few years ago - it was an industry conference, and a colleague and I talked our way into it. We were the *only* two privacy advocates in the room.

One of the things I remember hearing was that reliability went way up when you combined biometrics - say, a retina scan and fingerprints. Fingerprints alone, or retina scans alone weren't as good. But, if you were going to use one biometric alone, retina scans would be the one (for the reasons Tedster listed).

Most of the industry people felt that fingerprints by themselves were not reliable enough. And, there are large segments of the population that can't 'enroll', that is, you can't get a good print from them. People who have worked with chemicals for many years are an example of such a group.

Sooooo, I suspect dual biometrics for identification will be the next step.

Cliff what I've read and heard and seen, is that they are set up and can scan peoples retinas over 100 yards away. That they are doing it as we type. Many many peoples information is going into the huge data bank.