Well, one of the reasons I kind of play up the French origin of this technology is because I think it turns into an interesting twist when it comes to US govern

Well, one of the reasons I kind of play up the French origin of this technology is because I think it turns into an interesting twist when it comes to US government adoption. Articles from the time period seem to agree that the technology was having a really hard time crossing the ocean from Europe, and while there were several factors I think a good chunk of it was just the payment networks in the US not being interested in adopting something new. But there's a bit of irony where, post 9/11, the US federal government decided they needed to really pick things up when it came to secure identity for federal employees and military personnel. So they developed and adopted the PIV standard now used for all federal credentials, which is a very soup-to-nuts smart-card based identity solution complete with PKI certificates and offline biometric authentication. The problem is that smart card technology, clearly the way to achieve this, hadn't taken off in the US, so they ended up having to buy pretty much the whole solution from France. Not that big of a deal in practice as Thales is a major defense contractor to the US anyway, but sort of a disappointment considering all the interest in keeping a strong domestic military technology capability. One wonders where the NSA was during this process, but the NSA has a tendency to both overengineer things to a degree that widespread use is infeasible, and keep things secret to a degree that widespread use is undesirable. So the more homegrown solutions to similar problems, things like the Fortezza cards, were complete nonstarters as a widespread solution to identifying federal personnel. So we have one of the factors here in the United States general lag in adoption of identity technology compared to other, especially European, countries.