I’m going to be travelling abroad this summer, and I’m starting the process of renewing my passport. I found out that all new US passports now have an RFID chip imbedded in them. I have very little faith in the government’s ability to keep my personal data safe, despite their claims here that everything is hunky dory. I don’t like the idea of travelling and having an electronic beacon on me that can identify me as a US citizen from a distance.
So, I think I have three options:
[ol]
[li]I can buy a wallet with a built-in faraday cage. This has the advantage of being more legal (seeing as how you’re not supposed to tamper with your passport).[/li][li]I can smash the chip with a hammer and claim it was an accident. This has the advantage of being WAY more satisfying.[/li][li]I can let someone convince me that I’m just being paranoid and the government is doing fine with this. The disadvantage of this one is that it’s really unlikely to happen.[/li][/ol]
Thoughts?
Meh, they’ll get ya with coins or your cellphone or something else that isn’t public yet. Kind of inescapable in this day and age. The hammer does sound wonderfully satisfying tho…
As I understand it, the only substantive data stored on the chip is a digital image of your passport’s photograph.
It’s unlcear to me what you’re worried about. The link above indictaes the skimming countermeasures; even if defeated, it seems to me the bad guys are capturing… a pic of your face.
Just to clarify: The RFID chip makes its presence known when it passes within a few feet of a scanner. Chances are overwhelming that the only place you will go through that sort of scanner, they’ll also ask to look at your passport. It will be a few years before they start installing them on every street corner so they can track the moment-to-moment movement of the citizenry.
However, in the meantime, I find myself wondering the same questions I wonder when they ask to scan my driver’s license at the liquor store:
Why?
What information is on there?
Is any of that information confidential?
Are you copying any of the confidential information?
Where is the data stored?
How securely is it transmitted and stored?
For how long?
Is the data purged after a certain amount of time, or is it kept (even in archival storage) permanently?
Again, why?
I haven’t met a liquor store clerk yet who knew the answer to any of the above perfectly reasonable questions, so I have yet to purchase anything from a store that requires it.
That doesn’t seem to be the case. On the website linked, it indicates it stores :
I’m not sure entirely what biographical information is, but I’m guessing it includes name, birth date, passport #, and country of citizenship at the least.
Not necessarily. Many warehouses and such have RFID scanners. They’re used for non-contact inventory control: for example, a warehouse will want to check the contents of crates on a moving conveyor, and they don’t want to open the box. The RFID scanner picks up the RFID ‘tag’ on the pallet, the one on the crate, the ones on the boxes inside the crate, and all the ones on the products inside the boxes. Sorting these out is a major software headache.
Do the passport tags conform to the international RFID tag standards? If so, there’s probably a wide range of equipment that can read them, even if they can’t do anything with the raw data they obtain. I would hope that the passport RFID tags use a completely-separate standard (radio frequency, data format, etc) that only governments use.
Canadian passport sdo not have an RFID chip. Yet. I should ask one of the Americans or Australians here at my work whether our scanners can read their passport tags.
(I work in a place that sells RFID gear and laser scanners.)
Right, so, if you happen to find yourself being chased by Bolivian thugs through a warehouse, make sure to ditch your passport before you throw yourself on the conveyor belt, because otherwise the government will be able to track your whereabouts.
:rolleyes:
What about the people who work in warehouses, many of whom are wide-travelling business and techie types? If I was an Evil Spy trying to lift info from passports, I’d do an inside job and try to get access to the info stream inventory-control scanners.
Actually a foil hat acts like a dish, gathering signals that are reflected up from the ground and bouncing them back in a concentrated fashion into your brain. See the tin foil rumour was started by the government, man.
All jokes aside, yes it’s smash it with a hammer or get one of those special wallets. Can a passport fit in a wallet? I guess I’m picturing those little blue books, are they smaller now?
Embedding RFID chips in passports is a perversion of what RFID technology is supposed to be about. That being tagging cards for on-screen display in televised poker.
So what happens when you reach the inspection station, they fail to scan your passport’s RFID, inspect the passport, then find out it got smashed? Do they take you to the room in the back, or just ship you off to Gitmo?