High-tech passports coming; complaints already in
story.news.yahoo.com
Mon Apr 4, 8:54 AM ET
By Mimi Hall, USA TODAY
The dark blue cover will look the same, but U.S. passports are getting a high-tech makeover this year.
Blue-jacketed tourist passports, as well as the maroon-and-black-covered ones used by diplomats and others on government business, are being redesigned and going electronic. The goal is to make it harder to copy or tamper with them, just as currency has been redesigned to fight counterfeiting.
Monday is the last day for the public to submit comments on the plan to the State Department. Among those who have complaints are privacy rights activists and some business travelers worried that the new passports will make Americans less safe abroad.
What's generating controversy is a computer chip that will be in a passport's back cover. It will contain all the information now printed on the first page of the passport, including name, date of birth, place of birth, nationality, passport number and a digitized photo.
Border agents will use a machine to "read" the chip and verify a passport holder's identity. "We're trying to reduce the market in stolen documents and passport identity theft," says Frank Moss, head of the State Department's passport office.
Moss says the new passports are part of a worldwide effort to make travel safer and easier for legitimate passport-holders and to prevent terrorists and other criminals from using fake or altered documents.
Foreigners from 27 countries who are not required to have visas to enter the USA must have chips in new passports by October. Those countries include Britain, Germany and Japan. The information is already encoded in the visas of people who need them for work, travel or study in this country.
The new U.S. passports will be issued to diplomats and other State Department employees beginning in August. This fall or winter, the government will begin issuing them to everyone who applies for a new or renewed passport. Because most passports are good for 10 years, every passport holder should have the new version by 2016.
Opponents of the plan say the new passports will make Americans more vulnerable abroad. They say terrorists or other criminals could get hold of machines that read the chips from a distance, which could allow them to target tourists and business travelers.
"Terrorists, criminals and kidnappers would be able to easily identify Americans," the Business Travel Coalition says. "Walking down a hotel corridor, it would be simple to determine in which guest rooms Americans were staying."
At issue is whether the chips can be read by machines that send out radio signals and activate the chip to send back its information. The State Department acknowledges that "skimming," or illegally reading the information, could occur. Its notice in the Federal Register says a chip-reader would have to be within 4 inches, but privacy advocate Bill Scannell says a powerful reader could pick up the information from much farther away.
Moss says tests are being done to figure out how to prevent that. "We will be putting anti-skimming technology into the passports," he says.
Scannell, who has a Web site called www.RFIDkills.com (for radio-frequency ID) says a terrorist could use a high-powered machine to scan a cafe and determine how many Americans were inside.
"Americans have enough things to worry about when traveling overseas. Having an electronic bull's-eye on our backs shouldn't be one of them," his Web site says.
But Moss says the passport cannot be read if it's closed. "We wouldn't ... adopt a passport technology that was going to put people at risk as they travel around the world," he says. |
