A number of countries are about to launch trials of passports and visas that incorporate basic biometric information about the document holder alongside the traditional photo and passport number -- data such as a digital image of the citizen's face that will be compared to a facial scan taken at the airport.
The first country to take the plunge will likely be Belgium, which plans to conduct an e-passport trial later this year, with possible real-world implementation by next year. The UK Passport Office recently announced that it is looking for volunteers to help test the recording and verification of facial recognition, iris and fingerprint biometrics. And New Zealand and Canada are also actively looking into conducting trials.
Australia and the United States, meanwhile, have issued requests for proposals for trials of their own, and the Netherlands is looking at ways for banks to adopt chip-based documents that would be used to confirm identification.
In part, the incorporation of digital data is a natural evolution that brings what have long been purely paper documents into the 21st century. In addition, with global worries about terrorism and other threats on the rise, the technology shift will help governments keep their border checks up-to-date. Banks and other institutions are likely to use the high-tech documents to provide better verification of customers and cut down on fraud and other crimes involving mistaken identity.
"When biometric identity has been confirmed, it does help to prevent the person from using another name in their dealings," said Barry Kefauver, a consultant and former US deputy assistant secretary of state for passport services.
Critics of the technology, however, are worried that governments might use the data to track citizens going about their ordinary business or that miscreants who steal the high-tech passports might be better equipped to carry out identity theft.
"It is too easy to steal information out of a card," said Katherine Albrecht, the founder and director of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, or CASPIAN, a policy watchdog created to expose data issues with supermarket loyalty programs.
Proponents acknowledge these concerns. But they say they've included technology that will shield private information contained in e-passport memory chips and keep it from falling into the hands of unauthorised parties. Security systems are never perfect, but the internal systems on these chips will make it difficult to surreptitiously read (or alter) information the chips contain.
"You are not able to track a person except when tracking them in and out of a city," said Joerg Borchert, vice president of secure mobile solutions at Infineon Technologies. Governments already have that ability using old-fashioned passports, he added.
Infineon, the German chipmaking giant, has been active in moving the technology out of the labs and has been bidding on the various passport projects. It has begun to ship samples of two identification chips it says can improve travel security and cut down on problems such as bank fraud because they contain more than 50 mechanisms designed to foil tampering.
At the same time, the company has tried to preserve privacy by including an encryption processor that scrambles data coming out of the identity documents and reducing the range for extracting data from the chips to just a few inches. The chips are "contactless," meaning that the information contained in them is extracted wirelessly by a reading device.
One of the chips will function as a smart card and contain information such as credit card numbers and insurance information, while the other, designed for passports, will contain only ID information such as facial images or fingerprints. The chips are available in sample quantities now but will go into high-volume production by the end of the year.
Passports, please
The push for better passports began in 1997 under the guidance of the International Civil Aviation Organization, or ICAO, a UN agency. An ICAO technology working group was charged with establishing better security standards for travel documents, standards that could be applied worldwide and would be cost effective.
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