Electronic Passports Might Not Measure Up
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The United States hasn't issued any microchip-equipped passports yet, but as the Department of State tests different prototypes, the international standards for the passports are under fire from privacy advocates who worry the technology won't protect travelers from identity thieves.
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The State Department did not head off a massive backlog of passport applications before this summer's peak travel season, despite warnings as early as November that demand was running far higher than expected, congressional investigators said yesterday.
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Americans and Canadians can still cross without a passport, but they'll need two forms of government-issued I.D., not just a driver's license.
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So-called "paper audit trails" are unlikely to solve accuracy problems associated with electronic voting and would in fact introduce another potential problem to the mix, according to a report issued Tuesday. But even some critics of current e-voting tech are discounting the ITIF's take on the matter.
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Personal identity has taken on a new meaning in the digital age, where basic facts like your name, address or age are far less important to some people than the collected records of what you were looking at online.
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Visitors to the US from 27 countries now need machine-readable passports if they do not have visas.
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Super size me The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) has produced a larger version of the biometric passport.â¦
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Secondary IPS site in shared credentials snafu Digital certificate glitches have affected the operation of a secondary website used for UK passport applications.â¦
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Think your family doesn't qualify? Look again to be sure.
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A program that offers a special security checkpoint for frequent travelers hasnât rolled out at nearly the pace originally predicted.
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Serious doubts are raised on the accuracy of a new ID system being introduced on new UK passports next year.
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Personal identity has taken on a new  meaning in the digital age, where basic facts like your name,  address or age are far less important to some people than the  collected records of what you were looking at online.
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The US Department of Homeland Security's VISIT program will not us RFID technology to track foreigners leaving the country after a test of the system failed to impress officials.
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(InfoWorld) - A security expert has cracked one of the U.K.'s new biometric passports, which the British government hopes will cut down on cross-border crime and illegal immigration. The attack, which uses a common RFID (radio frequency identification) reader and customized code,Â siphoned data off an RFID chipÂ from a passport in a sealed envelope, said Adam Laurie, a security consultant who has worked with RFID and Bluetooth technology. The attack would be invisible to victims, he said. "That's the really scary thing," said Laurie, whose work was detailed in the Sunday edition of the Daily Mail newspaper. "There's no evidence of tampering. They're not going to report something has happened because they don't know." The British government, which began issuing RFID passports about a year ago, eventually wants to incorporate fingerprints and other biometric data on the chips, although privacy activists are concerned over how data will be stored and handled. Currently, the chip contains the printed details on the passports, the person's photograph, and security technology to detect if those files have been altered. The attack was executed while the passport was still in its original envelope used to send it from the passport service, since RFID chips can be read from a few inches away, Laurie said. He used a passport ordered by a woman affiliated with No2ID, a group that opposes the U.K.'s biometric passport and ID card programs. The data on the passport's chip is locked until an RFID reader provides the encryption key, Laurie said. The encryption key is calculated using a combination of the person's personal data, such as date of birth, and is contained in the "machine-readable zone" (MZR) -- the string of characters and digits on the bottom of the passport's first page. At an immigration desk, the optical character reader scans the MZR and gets the key. The RFID chip is unlocked, and the information on the chip is matched with that on the passport. However, Laurie was able to do this process himself. He analyzed ICAO 9303, the standard from the International Civil Aviation Organization that been adopted worldwide for machine-readable passports, to see how the MZR is organized. Laurie also knew some of the woman's personal details -- used to calculate her passport's key -- and found out more through Internet research. He then wrote what's known as a "brute force" program, which repeatedly tries different combinations of data to discover the key. After about 40,000 attempts by the program, he cracked the key. To scan the chip, he used a common RFID reader from ACG ID, now part of Assa Abloy Identification Technology of Germany. The attack could then let Laurie begin the process of making an exact copy of the woman's passport. "[The biometric passport] has been sold to us as something that increases the security of the passport, but so far I don't see anything about it that increases my security," Laurie said. The greatest weakness with the passports is using relatively easy-to-find data to compose the encrypted key, Laurie said. It would be better to include more random elements that would render brute-force style programs nearly useless, he said. Laurie's work spawned from concern over how users can know what's on their passport's chip. "At the moment, if you want to see what's in your own passport, you have to go to passport office," Laurie said. "With my code, you can do it at home." Laurie has published a library of open-source tools written in the Python programming language that will run on RFID readers made by ACG and by Frosch Electronics, based in Austria. Â
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FLORENCE Interior ministers from the five largest West European countries have agreed to adopt digital fingerprinting on passports, officials here said, but a second day of talks on Monday found them still deadlocked on a plan to create migrant holding
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The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have...
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Software on the Seine, anyone? Backup in Budapest? VTL from Vienna? And why not. Europeans have far more experience when it comes to dealing with data regulatory issues than we do.