Wireless World: Rethinking passport chips

international | miscellaneous | other press Tuesday May 03, 2005 04:03 by UPI - United Press International

A story about how the government wants to track people using passports.

Chicago, IL, Apr. 29 (UPI) -- The U.S. government may be rethinking a plan to imbed wireless tracking technology in the passport of every citizen after hearing objections about potential civil liberties violations, experts told UPI's Wireless World. The State Department plans later this year to install wireless radio frequency identification or RFID chips in all new passports it issues, but it is receiving flack about the amount of identifying information those chips will contain and whether that data will be secure from hackers."It is not backing away from the use of RFID in passports, it is rethinking the decision not to encrypt the data on the tag," said Mark Roberti, founder and editor of RFID Journal, a leading industry magazine in Hauppauge, N.Y. "The State Department is now looking at ways to secure the data on the tag." By Gene Koprowski