New High-Tech Passports Raise Snooping Concerns

The New York Times
November 26, 2004

New High-Tech Passports Raise Snooping Concerns
By MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON, Nov. 25 - The State Department will soon begin issuing passports that carry information about the traveler in a computer chip embedded in the cardboard cover as well as on its printed pages.

Privacy advocates say the new format - developed in response to security concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks - will be vulnerable to electronic snooping by anyone within several feet, a practice called skimming. Internal State Department documents, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, show that Canada, Germany and Britain have raised the same concern.

"This is like putting an invisible bull's-eye on Americans that can be seen only by the terrorists," said Barry Steinhardt, the director of the A.C.L.U. Technology and Liberty Program. "If there's any nation in the world at the moment that could do without such a device, it is the United States."

The organization wants the State Department to take security precautions like encrypting the data, so that even if it is downloaded by unauthorized people, it cannot be understood.

In a telephone interview, Frank E. Moss, deputy assistant secretary of state for passport services, said the skimming problem "can be dealt with."

"We are certainly still working hard on the question of whether additional security measures should be taken," he said.

The technology is familiar to the public in applications like highway toll-collection systems and "smart cards" for entering buildings or subway turnstiles. In passports, the technology would be more sophisticated, with a computer having the ability to query the chip selectively for particular information. The chip, expected to cost about $8, would hold 64 kilobytes of data, the same as early personal computers.

Last month the Government Printing Office awarded $373,000 in contracts to four manufacturers to design the passports, which would contain chips that stored all the printed data on the passport, as well as digitized data on the traveler's face.

At an airport immigration checkpoint, an antenna could read a passport waved a few inches away. A digital camera could look at the traveler's face and compare it with the data from the passport chip.

The problem, though, is that the passport might be read by others, too. According to one document obtained by the A.C.L.U., a State Department memo from September detailing negotiations on the subject, the American position is that the data "should be able to be read by anyone who chooses to invest in the infrastructure to do so."

Mr. Steinhardt of the A.C.L.U. described a test in which a chip was read from 30 feet away, but Mr. Moss of the State Department said that was in a laboratory and would be hard to duplicate in the field.

Government officials from the United States, Canada and western European countries, and chip manufacturing experts, have been discussing standards for chips in passports for more than two years under the auspices of the International Civil Aviation Organization, which is affiliated with the United Nations and promulgates a variety of standards for aviation. Mr. Steinhardt complained that the organization had ignored the civil liberties group's request to participate in sessions when standards were discussed.

The State Department, which issues about seven million passports a year, hopes to begin issuing a limited number with chips early next year, initially to government employees.

To combat passport fraud and theft, the government will soon require all visitors who do not need visas to enter the United States - those who are deemed low security risks because of the countries they come from - to carry passports that are machine-readable and contain "biometric" information like fingerprints or facial measurements.

Australia is already issuing passports with chips, and others will follow soon, Mr. Moss said. And since passport requirements are usually reciprocal, the United States anticipates that those countries will demand similar features on American passports.

Neville G. Pattinson, the director of business development, technology and government affairs at Axalto, one of the vendors, said the problem with encryption was that the chip had to be readable by governments all over the world. But, he said, "there is a considerable concern over skimming."

The chips raise the possibility of someone "brushing against you with the equipment, in a briefcase or another disguise, and hoping they can read it out of your pocket or purse," Mr. Pattinson said. Another possibility is someone embedding a reader in a doorway, he said.

But he said low-cost fixes were available. One would incorporate a layer of metal foil into the cover of the passport so it could be read only when opened.

Another would put a password into the printed information in the passport. A reader would optically scan for the password, which would be visible only when the passport was open, and then use it to obtain data from the chip.

Another possibility would be to keep the passport in a foil pouch, like those issued with highway toll-collection devices so they can be carried through a toll booth without being read. In multilateral discussions, though, some experts said they feared that terrorists would use the pouches to smuggle weapons.

The A.C.L.U. is seeking to portray the new passports as part of a continuing loss of privacy.

In March, the A.C.L.U. and 12 other organizations from North America, Europe and Asia signed a letter to the aviation organization saying they were "increasingly concerned that the biometric travel document initiative is part and parcel of a larger surveillance infrastructure monitoring the movement of individuals globally."