RFID PASSPORT: “SHOOT ME!”

When pri­vacy provo­ca­teur Bill Scannell called me in my Tombstone, Arizona hotel room a few weeks back, rant­ing about the State Department’s deci­sion to imbed radio fre­quency ID chips into pass­ports, I didn’t pay him much mind. New pass­ports are already machine read­able, I thought. So what if they can be read from a lit­tle fur­ther away?
I guess I can be a lit­tle thick some­times. Especially when it’s late at night, and I’m on assign­ment. Because after read­ing this story in Salon, I get it. The dan­gers of RFID pass­ports are pretty freakin’ obvious.

The rea­son RFID is more con­tro­ver­sial than, say, a bar code is that the data on the chip is read by a remote reader. The State Department asserts that the tags it will use can be read from only 4 inches away. But pri­vacy advo­cates say there’s no way the State Department can guar­an­tee that.
As secu­rity expert Bruce Schneier writes on his blog: “Unfortunately, RFID chips can be read by any reader, not just the ones at pass­port con­trol. The upshot of this is that trav­el­ers car­ry­ing around RFID pass­ports are broad­cast­ing their iden­tity. Think about what that means for a minute. It means that pass­port hold­ers are con­tin­u­ously broad­cast­ing their name, nation­al­ity, age, address and what­ever else is on the RFID chip. It means that any­one with a reader can learn that infor­ma­tion, with­out the pass­port holder’s knowl­edge or con­sent. It means that pick­pock­ets, kid­nap­pers and ter­ror­ists can eas­ily — and sur­rep­ti­tiously — pick Americans or nation­als of other par­tic­i­pat­ing coun­tries out of a crowd.“
There are no plans to encrypt the data on the tags in pass­ports. “This is a dan­ger­ous, inap­pro­pri­ate device to be installing in U.S. pass­ports,” says Scannell, who imag­ines ter­ror­ists over­seas iden­ti­fy­ing Americans by their pass­ports when pick­ing tar­gets to bomb. “Which cafe do we lob the grenade into? Ping, ping, ping. There are 21 Americans in there.” The tags could also be used to iden­tify peo­ple who walk into an abor­tion clinic, a mosque or a polit­i­cal meeting. 

April 8th, 2005 | Homeland Security | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.