The fingerprint situation on papers is a mess: Since 2007 German passports must contain two fingerprints. They're encrypted with a key held by the German gover

The fingerprint situation on papers is a mess: Since 2007 German passports must contain two fingerprints. They're encrypted with a key held by the German government, (claimed to be) stored on the passport only. German ID cards can contain two fingerprints. Besides being optional, the same rules as for passports apply. On entry to the USA they don't seem to actually use the fingerprint data on the passport, and they require you to give ten fingerprints plus photo. The original claim is that the US required them. By now, many countries require the data on passports. But none of them seem to read it on foreign passports, and from what I understand they're not able to. So the main reason is that the requirement exists to force countries to provider a higher baseline against forgery. Alternatively they planned to access the fingerprints, but countries couldn't agree on a common standard and ACL system, or the USA got screwed because they required "digitally stored fingerprints", which they got (hence _two_ fingerprints) - but not in a format they can actually use. I kinda like that last option ;-)