Thread: Setback for chip based passports

Sun Aug 6, 9:54 AM ET
LAS VEGAS, Nevada (AFP) - High-tech passports touted as advances in national security can be spied on remotely and their identifying radio signals cloned, computers hackers were shown at a conference.

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Note the part that states, "A cheer rose from the legion of hackers in the conference room when Rieback announced that the schematics and the computer codes for the device would be made public"

I have so many different emotions about this article that I'm getting a headache thinking about it. Obvioulsy, the surest way to get something done is to declare that it can't be done. Much of the technology we now enjoy was first developed by "hackers" or by the response to something done by hackers. But I don't understand the mentality that intentially breaks a security device for personal gain. I guess I'm a Pollyanna. But no electronic device yet devised can perform as well as a knowledgable and dedicated human. Maybe I should add reasonable to that description. I was recently readmitted to the United States despite having my passport rejected at the scanner. Rather than taking precipitous action, the agent called for the supervisor, who immediately overrode the error. You see, the computer rejected my US Passport because it recognized it as being a stolen UK Passport. Had I not benefited from human intervention, it would have taken a long time and a lot of harrassment for me to get home.

I am with you on this Larry. I don't fully trust technology. This is not because I don't understand it, but exactly the opposite. I know how gadgets and things work and also how they don't work. To me, this passport thing just seems to be a way that we will dumb-down the border, customs agents, TSA, etc., ranks by giving them less training, less decision making authority, and less accountability by simply relying on and blamming the chips.

We were allowed to leave on a cruise in 2002 without our passports because humans realized that we were good people who forgot them (fell out of the cruise documents envelope and off side of the bed while packing), I already input them in online months earlier, we had photocopies in our possession, and my MIL faxed them copies before shipping them off overnight to be delivered to the ship in Key West (a U.S. port of course). They told us to go to a particular office at the cruise terminal when we got there and helped us though and let us board the cruise, contingent upon the actual passports arriving in Key West before we went on to foreign ports. This happened because humans had common sense.