Indonesia advances world's most ambitious biometric-based national ID project

Indonesia, a country that's basically an archipelago of more than  70,000 islands that has infrastructure issues in electricity and limited bandwidth, is rolling out the world's most ambitious biometrics-based national identity card project for its citizens.

Indonesia is spending $600 million on a project to give 172 million residents a national identity card that will be used for a wide range of purposes, including proving identity for voter registration, passport issuance, tax and financial matters, and much more. This electronic national identity card, called the e-KTP, is a government effort to get millions of citizens to enroll at registration centers where their fingerprint, iris and face are captured as images through biometric equipment and personal information stored as a record associated with each electronic identity card. According to Husni Fahmi, who heads up the e-KTP project in Indonesia, the hope is all will be in place before the next election in 2014.