Almost entirely off-topic rant - apologies in advance:::

[Dave Howe]

Brian Morrison wrote:
|| Well, not to pour cold water on your theory, but in the same article
|| it does say that MLS state that the software does not store
|| fingerprints in their original form, it instead stores an encrypted
|| version of the 'points' in the fingerprint so that reconstructing
|| the fingerprint is supposed to be fairly hard. I can't say that I
|| know what the encryption used is, nor how the fingerprint is
|| distilled into recognition points, but this is a little different
|| from the gist of your posting.
IIRC though - that is exactly how the matching library in the national
computer works - by looking for significant points, making a map of
them, and comparing maps.
once they had it down to one or two possibles, they could probably get a
warrant on the strength of that to get the real fingerprints.