Quote Originally Posted by AdamG View Post
If the BBC can track down one of these guys, what could the Bad Guys (TM) do with him and his smart card?
As one of the commentators (Andreas Ferber) on the New Scientist article notes, the reporting is highly misleading:

Sorry, but almost all of this article is complete nonsense.

First the correct facts: yes, there is a "master key", yes, it has been broken into seven parts, and yes, five of the key holders must come together in order to use the key. That's it, everything else is wrong.

There is nothing about "rebooting" anything. The root nameservers (they are in some remote sense what you might call "heart of the internet") are hundreds of individual machines scattered all over the world. If any of those machines need rebooting, one of the local operators logs into the machine and reboots it, simple as that....
(more at the link above)

In essence, these folks have keys which give them access to the vaults where parts of the key used to set the encryption for the root zone each year are stored.

Short version: don't worry.