U.S. Passports To Carry Digitally Signed Images
The U.S. governments plans to issue “smart” passports, featuring embedded microchips that store a compressed image of the owner’s face, to U.S. citizens in October 2004.
Designed to prevent tampering, the digital passports will include cryptographically signed digital images to guarantee their authenticity.
Although civil liberties groups have expressed concerns about the government using the new passports as a monitoring tool, Frank Moss, deputy assistant secretary for Passport Services at the U.S. Department of State, maintains that information will only be forwarded to centralized databases if there is a query over the authenticity of a passport. What is more, Moss says the passports will only include basic passport information.
Some technical experts have also warned that smart passports do not guarantee safety, adding that the new passports will only help to identify known suspects or people who have forged passports.
Richard Clayton, a hardware security expert at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, adds that everyone involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had a photo ID.
Meanwhile, the European Union plans to spend 140 million euros to develop an interoperable biometric system, which would enable passports to carry fingerprints and iris scan biometric data.
Such biometric information would be much easier to cross-reference than photographs of an individual with different hair styles and facial hair.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from the New Scientist (07/23/03); Knight, Will.