Page II: The United States moves forward with a plan to put RFID chips and biometric data in passports by early next year.
The State Department may eventually incorporate fingerprints and iris scan information for extra measure. But that's further off because it would require fingerprinting the general public, something that may not go down too well with people because of the criminal taint of being fingerprinted, Kefauver said.
But facial recognition technology is a relatively new and somewhat unreliable. The British government postponed testing biometric identification cards with 10,000 people earlier this year after it ran into glitches with its iris-scanning and facial recognition equipment.
In addition, privacy advocates are concerned that the chips, which can be read remotely through clothing and purses at a debatable distance, could subject passport holders to spying, theft and other unsavory activities. The American Civil Liberties Union, Privacy International in London and a couple dozen other organisations have petitioned the United Nations to reign in its members' e-passport plans and beef up privacy protections.
Seeds of distrust
Some well-regarded security experts even imagine sinister motives behind the push toward e-passports. Bruce Schneier, author and founder of Counterpane Internet Security, writes in his Web log that the government should abandon the RFID mechanism altogether in favour of a chip that requires direct contact with its scanner.
"If there were a good offsetting reason to choose (RFID) technology over a contact chip, then the choice might make sense," Schneier said in his blog.
"Unfortunately, there is only one possible reason: The administration wants surreptitious access themselves," he continued. "It wants to be able to identify people in crowds. It wants to surreptitiously pick out the Americans, and pick out the foreigners. It wants to do the very thing that it insists, despite demonstrations to the contrary, can't be done."
The era when e-passports are widespread is still some years away. Passports are valid for 10 years, so it will take a long time for a majority of the population to replace the ordinary passports they have today.
16%
7%
