WRITTEN ON July 21st, 2005 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Identity
Chris Lightfoot (who feels passionately about these issues) observed a couple of weeks ago that
The ICAO biometric passport programme requires only that passports be equipped with a `smart-card’ style chip containing information about the bearer (the same stuff that’s printed in the machine-readable zone on the bottom of the back page of your passport in and angular OCR font), plus a digitised photograph and a cryptographic signature.
This is all that is needed to implement the new ICAO passports standard. How much will it cost?
* in Germany, the cost of a passport will increase by 36 Euros, or about £23;
* in Australia, the cost will go up by A$19, or about £8;
* whereas here in Britain the government plans to charge everyone an additional £51 on the current £42 fee for a new passport.What’s actually going on here is a fairly simple scam. The idea is to add lots of bits of the ID cards programme (like the database that records every transaction you have with the public sector) into the cost of passports to make the cost of ID cards seem more reasonable, and then lie that these expenses are actually necessary under our international obligations.
Fair point. Even if everyone was straight about all the facts all the time, this would still be a complicated calculation. But I fear they’re not.
Some questions:
a. How can a traveller test their “chipped” passport before travelling?
b. What happens if they arrive at a border, but their passport fails to “scan”?
Conventional paper passports are remarkably tolerant to everyday accidents and damage. Unacceptable damage is obvious to the owner.
When your credit card fails to scan, you can use another one or pay by cash etc. Most people use their credit cards very frequently so quickly discover any failures.
Most people use their passports much less often: It may take years before they try to travel only to discover that the “chip” has failed.