It's easy to say that fingerprints are unique, so they make a perfect
> identifier. But interpreting fingerprints is not always so perfect. We
> had a classic and high-profile example up here in Oregon recently when
> a lawyer was detained for months as a terrorist on the basis of an
> incorrectly matched fingerprint.
And high-tech tools that are used by law-enforcement and security agencies but not generally employed and thus tested and validated by researchers in real scientific fields should always be treated as highly suspect.
As examples, fingerprint analysis has considerable validity, but not nearly as much as law enforcement agencies would have you believe; and polygraphy ("lie detectors") is total voodoo junk science.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: What you say is very true. What do you think about the newest gimmick, DNA-printing? Police seem to be making a big thing out of building up their DNA files at this time. They *claim* it is much more reliable than fingerprinting, and they *claim* one's DNA is absolutely unique, but they said that about fingerprints at one time also. PAT]