RFID in passports starting in December |
RFID in new passports? My initial thought: good idea. This is bound to further stir the pot of privacy advocates and fearful Orwellian believers who don’t read the fine print which clearly indicates that physical touch is required to unlock the information embedded in the chip.
As a result of tougher post-Sept. 11 security requirements, all new U.S. passports issued by the end of this year are supposed to have a microchip containing the holders’ name, nationality, sex, birth date, place of birth, issuing office and a biometric identifier - a digital photograph. A tiny antenna embedded in the passport cover will allow remote reading devices to capture the data on the chip.
Predictably some privacy advocates are already playing the “we don’t know how this will be used” card. Stop, please. Who is going to need a passport? People who enter or leave the country. When these same people are travelling most likely they are carrying a cell phone with a GPS beacon built-in. Doh! They are already carrying technology that can be tracked. If you don’t want to be tracked, then don’t take a cell phone with you (VoIP is a good alternative).
Until we start talking RFID chips that are proven to be used for tracking purposes in driver’s licenses, credit cards or other forms of IDs that we carry on our person every day out of necessity and that can be tracked, I’m not going to go all Oliver Stone on this one.
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I think you (or the AP) might be confused on terminology.
If it’s RFID, there is no physical touch required. That’s the RF part. People have demonstrated (see http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/10/rfid_passports.html) that RFID tags can be read at distances of 20 meters. So, why is that bad?
Well, the most obvious question is one of safety. If I’m visiting Rome, for example - and I’m not picking on Rome, specifically, but it is known as a place where tourists should be careful - I would prefer that people cannot automatically identify me as a) a tourist and b) an *American* tourist. One can argue about how big the increased risk is, but there are certainly bad scenarios that this enables.
The curious question is “Why RFID?” There are good smart card technologies that require physical contact, which would seem to work great for passports, since you are in physical contact with customs officials when you use your passport. That the government has settled on RFID begs the question of what they need that RF portion for.
Cell phone tracking is a very different question. You wouldn’t use RFID to track people, you’d use it to find out which ones were Americans, and (depending on the information security), you could even find out more information about them.
Comment by Eric Gunnerson — October 27, 2005 @ 12:31 pm PST
Eric - check out the article. It says there is some kind of special antennae that has to touch the passport in order to “unlock” the RFID information which I found to be kind of interesting. It can’t be beamed is what I gathered from it anyway. Also, I think the points you raise are valid about security.
Comment by TDavid — October 27, 2005 @ 12:59 pm PST