The Guardian has all the gory details this morning in a story that confirms all of the worst fears of those who oppose RFID chips in passports and national ID cards in general.
From the article: “Today, some three million such passports have been issued, and they don’t look so secure. I am sitting with my scary computer man and we have just sucked out all the supposedly secure data and biometric information from three new passports and displayed it all on a laptop computer.
“The UK Identity and Passport Service website says the new documents are protected by “an advanced digital encryption technique”. So how come we have the information? What could criminals or terrorists do with it? And what could it mean for the passports and the ID cards that are meant to follow?”
Guess the bottom-line questions are obvious here: Fixable? … Or good reason to junk the whole idea?
Copyright © 2006 IDG Communications, Inc.
