@Portugal, try a carrot
"It worked, so obviously on the way out I tried to scrunch my face up as much as possible to defeat it. It still worked."
I have an open door, it works 100% of the time, I scrunch my face up as much as possible, but the door was still open! The door works!
My point being, to work, the Portuguese unit has to reject the fakes and accept the real ones. I reckon from it's method of working it is using height + distance between eyes as the main two biometrics. Which means false positives are the most likely outcome.
On the early trials it failed repeatedly which was blamed on calibration, so I reckon they loosened up the tolerances a lot to let a lot more people through. False negatives complain, but false positives, they tend to you walk through and try not to make a fuss!
With the new card cloning, it will make faking this machine a lot easier, even if you tightened it up completely.
As ever the test for security is to put it out for proper challenge and proper security testing. Just like voting machine vendors claimed their voting machines are perfect..... and shock-horror it turns out to be trivial to change the vote. Just like every single piece of software in the world goes out perfect and gets ripped full of security holes when under close public scrutiny.
But hey, THIS time it will be different and it will work first time without the scruitiny. Yet they won't let it out of the airport, so nobody can show how easy it is to defeat legally.
You still see politicians claiming that a stock chinese touch panel can tell the difference between a dead finger cut off a body and a live finger.....they don't know about capacitance screens even! (Try operating your iPod with a plastic pen, doesn't work, now try with a carrot... works, that's a capacitive screen, the juicy carrot and your body form one plate of a capacitor).
It's like Government is full of rubes and having been sold a dud they have to pretend its great!