Passports now mean easy passage into personal information.

Via Americablog, The Guardian's reporter talks about how easy it was to glean information from the old paper trail:
"Six months ago, with the help of a rather scary computer expert, I deconstructed the life of an airline passenger simply by using information garnered from a boarding-pass stub he had thrown into a dustbin on the Heathrow Express. By using his British Airways frequent-flyer number and buying a ticket in his name on the airline's website, we were able to access his personal data, passport number, date of birth and nationality."

And so what does he find with the new passports and their RFID chips?

"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). 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.

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."

So are people any safer?

"The Home Office insists that UK passports are secure and among the best in the world, but not everyone agrees. Last week, an EU-funded body entitled the Future of Identity in the Information Society (Fidis) issued a declaration on machine-readable travel documents such as RFID-chipped passports and ID cards. It said the technology was "poorly conceived" and added: "European governments have effectively forced citizens to adopt new ... documents which dramatically decrease their security and privacy and increase risk of identity theft.""


So, this new safe technology is kinda like our electronic voting machines.... easy to misuse information for your own personal ends?

"The government is now facing demands from the Liberal Democrats and anti-ID card groups for a recall of the passports so that simple devices such as foil covers can be installed - at enormous cost. Such covers would at least stop chips being scanned remotely, though they wouldn't prevent an unscrupulous hotel receptionist from opening the passport and sucking out its contents the way we did.

It may be that at some point in the future the government will accept that putting RFID chips in to passports is ill-conceived and unnecessary. Until then, the only people likely to embrace this kind of technology are those with mischief in mind."

I'll take that as a yes.