Don't Wait -- Renew Your Passport Now!
Bruce Schneier, of Counterpane Security, has written a disturbing column in the Dallas Morning News about the dangerous technology additions to new passports. His opinion is that the radio-frequency identification chips to be installed in new passports will make travelers more susceptible to identity theft.
These RFID chips store an electronic copy of passport information, including your name and photo. The potential problem is that RFID reader machines can scan this information without touching the passport -- the passport merely has to be within a short distance of the reader. This means a crook could set up a reader at a hotel, bank, or any other place you show your passport. The crook could then read your passport information and use that for illicit purposes.
While the U.S. State Department has taken certain security measures to guard against such ID theft, Schneier's biggest concern is that passports issued with the new RFID chip will have a normal lifetime of ten years. Surely by ten years from now, crooks will have come up with new and improved ways to steal your passport information from the RFID chip.
The column concludes with this warning:
The Colorado passport office is already issuing RFID passports, and the State Department expects all U.S. passport offices to be doing so by the end of the year. Many other countries are in the process of changing over. So get a passport before it's too late.
With your new passport you can wait another 10 years for an RFID passport, when the technology will be more mature, when we will have a better understanding of the security risks and when there will be other technologies we can use to cut the risks. You don't want to be a guinea pig on this one.
