All these would be stored on a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) microchip, which can be accessed from a short distance using radio waves. The ICAO recommended that passports should contain facial biometrics, though countries could introduce fingerprints at a later date. Standards for the new passports were set by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) in 2003 and adopted by the waiver countries and the US. Among those 27 countries are the major EU members, and other friendly nations ranging from Andorra and Iceland to Singapore, Japan and Brunei. It told 27 countries that participated in a visa waiver programme that citizens with passports issued after the 26th of last month must have micro-chipped biometric passports or would have to apply for a US visa. 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?įirst it is necessary to explain why the new passports were introduced, and how they work.After the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre, in which fake passports were used, the US decided it wanted foreign citizens who presented themselves at its borders to have more secure "machine-readable" identity documents. The UK Identity and Passport Service website says the new documents are protected by "an advanced digital encryption technique". 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.
Today, some three million such passports have been issued, and they don't look so secure. These, the argument went, would make identity theft much more difficult and pave the way for the government's proposed ID cards in 2008 or 2009. Great news then, we thought, that the UK had just begun to issue new, ultra-secure passports, incorporating tiny microchips to store the holder's details and a digital description of their physical features (known in the jargon as biometrics).
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