Another contains an optical recording strip, again encapsulated in a credit-card format. Drexler has since announced an improved version with about one and a half times the capacity. A smart card is a portable personal data base. People with the right equipment can read this information or change it. The government currently leaks like a sieve.
Some government employees treat government-held information like a treasure trove.
In recent years, law enforcement agencies have cited people from state and local police departments, the FBI, the Social Security Administration and the IRS for stealing information and selling it to information brokers, credit bureaus and skip tracers, or for inquisitively prying into the files of neighbors and celebrities. Look what happened to tennis champion Arthur Ash. He was sick with AIDS, but he did not want to make his illness public. Yet the word got out. With even more people gaining access to information via smart cards, both the average person and people like Arthur Ash don't stand a chance.