I do that with my iPad - a piece of semi-transparent tape on the camera on the screen side.

Sometimes I use a rutabaga rather than a potato.

This is just one step closer to an ID system that is functional in these 1970's vice the 1930's technology of a 9 digit number. By the year 2010 they'll be laughing at us on how primitive things were and that a 9 digit number could be used to steal your identity.

Why in God's good name we didn't implement a national ID something stupid long like 4096 bits long encrypted with 256 bit AES using a 12 digit PIN and biometrics 40 years ago is beyond me. Yes, having a PKI infrastructure in place would be scary but at least only the government would be able to see your shit instead of every illegal alien being able to steal your identity, ruin your credit, and commit crimes using your name.

This is why when the government put a gun to my head and forced me, literally at gunpoint, to take and carry the stupid phone I didn't take it. The gunshot wound to my head healed in time and I did regain use of my left hand.

The smartphone can't track you, can't record you, can't steal your fingerprints unless YOU let it.

I'm more worried about the surveillance cameras on the street poles here and in the drones in Texas. I can choose to not carry a cell phone but it's not so easy to choose to not go outside.

We have become a surveillance nation and Big Brother isn't going away. The NSA isn't going to stop reading your mail. The local governments aren't going to stop tracking you with your cell phone, monitoring your electrical power use, measuring how much heat your home gives off, stopping you at random checkpoints and demanding to see your papers .... these are scary times people but having someone steal an algorithm that represents my fingerprint is the least of my worries.

Between your cellphones G3/G4 unique ID, it's bluetooth or even near-field signals you can be tracked to with a very few feet of where you're sitting. Even without a cellphone any RFID tags in your credit cards, shoes, belt, or jacket can do a pretty good job of tracking you. Surveillance cameras use automatic license plate readers to track your vehicle and even those are developing a digital ID with On-Star and bluetooth transmitters.

Years ago I saw a surveillance system being marketed to the government that integrated video.

The amazing thing was the way it handled the data. It could take in video from dedicated street surveillance camera, low resolution ATM or store front cameras, video and stills from drones and satellites and using geolocation and some custom software track things backwards in time. Want to know everyone that terrorist X came into contact with today ... spot him once and then play his day backwards. They track faces and autos with ease doing some amazing analysis to remove false positives. The data could be filtered to allow non-cleared people one view of the data and cleared people another view. Everything was indexed and there were machines constantly doing indexing on the data to speed searches up.

I was seeing the demo system and wasn't able to do hands-on to see if what they were showing was a smoke and mirrors demo or the thing was real. That was years and years ago ... the technology has advanced further and I would be shocked to hear that they weren't integrating the visual tracking system with things that track folks using cell phones, bluetooth, RFID and other electronic DNA.

If you want your eyes really opened wide attend the annual Black Hat/DefCon conference in Las Vegas. For a few bucks you don't even need a TS/SCI clearance to see things that will really bring out the paranoid in you.