Officials disagree over effectiveness of passport chip

SEATTLE - A government official on Wednesday downplayed the privacy implications of a new wireless chip technology that soon will be embedded into American passports, but a civil liberties advocate disagreed with his stance.

The State Department is installing chips that can be read wirelessly by machines when Americans pass through U.S. immigration. The chips contain the information that American passports currently display, such as name, identification number and photograph, enhanced by facial-recognition technology.

The new passports will be rolled out and tested by about August. State has said the new technology will enable immigration officials to authenticate a passport holder's identity and make the documents better resistant to tampering.

Frank Moss, State's deputy assistant secretary for passport services, said during a panel discussion that civil libertarians' have overblown their concern that fraudsters and terrorists having the ability to access that data remotely with their own chip scanners and then to commit crimes with that information. The chips can only be read by a machine that is at the most 10 centimeters away, he said.

"The idea that you can walk through a lobby of a hotel and that you can be scanned is poppycock," he said at the Computer, Freedom and Privacy conference.

Opponents of the wireless chips in passports have suggested that the technology could make Americans vulnerable to identity theft domestically, and Americans traveling abroad could be walking targets for terrorists. They say that fraudsters and terrorists could purchase scanners to scan crowds to acquire the information contained in the chips.

Moss also pointed out that the chips do not contain some of the information that is central to the crime of identity theft, such as Social Security numbers and home addresses.

But after Moss' presentation, Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty program, demonstrated that a reader could read his passport information from more than 10 centimeters away. He charged that the chips can be read from as far away as 30 feet.

Moss vigorously defended the administration's passport initiative and said that State would not roll out the new passports without incorporating a mechanism that will prevent unauthorized access to the passport holders' personal information.

"I want to assure all of you [that] this passport will not be issued to the public before we address the problem of skimming," he said. "We take this problem very seriously."

Skimming refers to the practice of using scanners to gain unauthorized access to passport holders' data.

Moss said possible technical solutions include the incorporation of a metal cover on the front of the passport designed to prevent unauthorized scanners from reading the data.