EU merges giant biometrics database. What could possibly go wrong?

Brexit starts to sound sane?

The 28 countries of the European Union each has its own biometrics databases of citizen IDs, residents, immigration, etc. The Common Identity Repository (CIR) project wants to centralize all that, with one enormous JOIN command.

I know what you’re thinking: “What a great idea! When CIR is up and running, law enforcement will be able to do a much better job of keeping EU citizens safe from all those bad people. I mean, I’m not a bad person, so CIR is a great thing, right?”

But what of the unintended consequences? And what about false positives? And how do we know the data won’t be misused—or hacked? In this week’s Security Blogwatch, we go off grid.


Read more: techbeacon.com/security/eu-merges-giant-biometrics-database-what-could-possibly-go-wrong