* The reporter lied.
* The reporter forgot.
* Apple devices share fingerprint matching details and another device had her details (this is supposed to be impossible, and I have no reason to believe it isn't).
* The government hacked the computer such that it would unlock this way (probably impossible as well).
* The fingerprint security is much worse than years of evidence suggests.
Mainly it was buried at the very end of the article, and I thought it worth mentioning here in case people missed it.
Fingerprint security being poor is also unlikely, because that would only apply if a different finger had been registered.
From what I can tell, this snapshot is preventing space reclamation. The last month or so, I've constantly run out of disk space even when not doing anything special. As in actually run out of disk space — apps start to become unresponsive or crash, and I get warning boxes about low disk space. When you run low, the OS is supposed to reclaim the space used by snapshots, but I guess it doesn't happen,
The stuck snapshot can't be deleted with tmutil. I get a generic "failed to delete" error. The snapshot is actually mounted by the backup daemon, but unmount also fails. The only solution I've found is to reboot. Then I get 200-300GB back and the cycle starts again, with snapshots getting stuck again.
I'm considering updating to Tahoe just because there's a chance they fixed it in that release.
Also, backups over the network are possible and have worked well for me for a few years.