While the idea of putting RFID chips into US passports sounds, on first blush, like an interesting idea (providing remote reading and confirmation of passport contents), the implication — that folks who want to target US citizens for kidnapping or killing could also scan a crowd for any Americans that weren’t obvious by their clothing or speaking styles — is a lot less attractive.
In short, an RFID chip would be sort of the high tech equivalent of an American flag — or a bulls-eye — over the head of anyone carrying one.
Swell.
(And that’s just a fraction of the problem. Would you hand out all the info on your passport — name, address, phone number, date of birth, etc. — to everyone you meet? Why, then, would you let your passport do so for you? Can you say “fraud” and “identity theft” and “jacking up prices for the silly American tourists who just walked in”?)
(via BoingBoing)
Given that the State Dept. has had demonstrated to them that, yes, RFID can be read further than 10cm away, they’re backing down on having unencrypted data on RFID chips in passports, and reconsidering a plan that most other countries (the EU, for example) have adopted, which requires a security key hashed from info in the passport itself. I.e., you’d need to physically open the passport to get the key to get the info to broadcast properly. That prevents effortless scanning of passports … but that’s both the bad news (for streamlining passport procedures) and good news (for avoiding the sort of security problems outlined above).