RSSNew Electronic Passports Draw Concern
By Ed Oswald | Published October 26, 2005, 4:11 PM
Beginning in December, United States passports will be issued with an embedded electronic RFID chip that stores personal information and is intended to make the document harder to copy.
But when first announced last February, the passport plan was met with concern from privacy advocates who said not enough was done to ensure the information is kept safe from prying eyes. 2,335 comments, or almost 95 percent of those received from the public, were opposed to the idea.
Thus, on Tuesday, the State Department announced some changes that it hopes will allay those fears.
Privacy groups said there was no protection that would prevent anyone with an RFID reader to obtain, or "skim," data from a passport. Since the chip contains personal information such as name, birth date and place of birth, it could be used by identity thieves.
Some groups went so far as to claim that terrorists could use the technology to identify American citizens.
In the new version of the electronic passport, however, the cover will contain "anti-skim" material that will only allow information to be read if the passport is actually opened. Also, a PIN number would be needed to access the information on the chip.
U.S. government officials also stressed that the new passport would "not permit tracking of individuals." However, privacy groups say it is not exactly clear what can and cannot be done with the new technology. A high-powered RFID reader could potentially bypass the cover protection.
Government employees will be the first to receive the passports in a test phase starting in December. A broader release to the general citizenry is expected to take place in early 2006.
I don't understand the want or need to use RFID technology for something as sensitive and critical to border enforcement as a passport. They'd be better off using something like a credit card where it at least requires the person to swipe the card instead of sending signals through the air. Seems like a dumb idea, imho.
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|don't really know much about passports or this technology.... is this simular to the biometric passports some european countries have adopted? I can see where both could be used for tracking a persons movements and stuff without their knowing it... too "big brother" for my tastes
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|To hell with privacy, I can see it now....stuck in Mexico with Montemzuma's revenge and they cant get your passport to scan........
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|That's why I have two passports: one real and one fake.
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|*designs a tinfoil passport holder*
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|eh if they testing on Givernment employees first, would we be watching them? Sure someone here could find a good reader and find out just how secure they are mm. For eh... educational purposes only, right?
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|Not sure if I like this. It'll be too easy to forge a passport.
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|I think right now it's too easy to forge. That's the whole reason why they are doing this. It's also why your drivers license now has a magnetic strip on the back. The more protections in place - the harder to fake.
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|well if you take the case of driver's licenses i have many friends who have fake ones with a magnetic strip that actually scans just like real ones. how do they do it? easy. buy the magnetic strip encoder thing and write the code on your pc and transfer it on the card. that was pretty hard to crack...
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|Most people don't have that technical knowledge though...
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|The card readers they have in many gas stations and other retailers now link up to a remote database to verify the information stored on the license. The only way you are going to get around that is if you have physical access to a *real* license that you intend to duplicate, and change the picture on. Some states are now testing devices that have the person's image digitally stored and encrypted on the driver's license/id card via smartchip...so changing the picture on the front would be worthless unless the place you are using the card at doesn't have the proper equipment, or just doesn't check. Well...until someone crackes the enc. algorithm and is able to re-encode the image... ;)
I think these new passports are a good idea, but the information stored needs to be secure.
As for people saying stuff like "oh now that can track you!" ...they track you whenever you use your old passport too, moron. They just have to enter the data into the computer manually.
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|Yikes...
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|Big Brother is WATCHING YOU!!!!!
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|And has been for years. What's new?
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