To ‘e’ or not to ‘e’ : The future of passports

The testing of e-passports is underway at the L.A. international airport and the Sydney airport. These e-passports contain computer chips with biographic and biometric information of the passport holder. The ‘live-test’ will run from June 15 to September 15th, 2005. The participants in this test include the air crew for certain airlines and hopefully they will not be busted and taken to Abu Gharib if a bug jumps up in the system. To be on the safe side, these volunteers will also be carrying their current passports. Although the authorities claim this to be a step up in security, I am not so sure. It would be easy for a terrorist to walk around the airport with a reader in hand and collect information from people’s e-passports and then use that information to create the chip or even email the information to another country and help terrorists travel using that information. This is a great implementation of wireless technology and I hope it works.

Click here to read the latest update as of today on e-passports