RFID PASSPORT PLAN FIZZLING?

The State Department may be back­ing off a bit from its dumb-​​ass plan to embed radio fre­quency ID chips in pass­ports, accord­ing to Wired News sleuth Kim Zetter.
Instead of freely broad­cast­ing to the world the passport-holder’s per­sonal infor­ma­tion, the State Department is mulling the idea of requir­ing the “RFID reader to pro­vide a key or pass­word before it could read data embed­ded on a… passport’s chip. It would also encrypt data as it’s trans­mit­ted from the chip to a reader so that no one could read the data if they inter­cepted it in tran­sit.“
Pretty Good Privacy cre­ator Phil Zimmerman thinks the plan can “end the threat of skim­ming and eaves­drop­ping” on the pass­ports by poten­tial evil-​​doers and iden­tity thieves.
But anti-​​RFID jihadist Bill Scannell notes that the chips would still con­tain a code that says the pass­port belongs to an American. “And for a lot of bad guys,” he adds, “that would be enough.“
THERE’S MORE: Ryan Singel has the scoop on inter­na­tional reac­tions to the E-​​passports — and what the gov­ern­ment may be hid­ing about its RFID tests.
AND MORE: Awww, yeah. “Responding to fears raised by pri­vacy advo­cates that new elec­tronic pass­ports might be vul­ner­a­ble to high-​​tech snoop­ing, the State Department intends to mod­ify the design so that an embed­ded radio chip hold­ing a dig­i­tized pho­to­graph and bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion is more secure,” the Times reports.

April 26th, 2005 | Homeland Security | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.