The hi-tech ePassport could make forgery and identity theft easier, BBC Click discovers.

[acmejack]

The ePassport is one of the many measures pursued by the United States and governments internationally after the horror of 11 September.

It will, we are promised, keep the unwanted and dangerous outside our borders, while streamlining entry for those welcome to come and visit.

But as the implementation of the scheme gets underway it is becoming clear that there could be serious problems with it.

With the old passport, we knew where we stood. If you lost it you knew you had lost it, but with the new, machine readable passports the story is very different.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/6182207.stm

[magellan]

1. Surprised no one's replied to this

I just read the article on the BBC site and came to see if it had been posted here. It confirms that RFID chipped passports are a security sham. More from the article:

snip

The good thing about RFID chips is that they emit radio signals that can be read at a short distance by an electronic reader.

But this is also the bad thing about them because, as Lukas demonstrated to me, he can easily download the data from his passport using an RFID reader he got for 200 Euros on eBay.

Lukas is less forthcoming about where he got what is called the Golden Reader Tool, it is the software used by border police and it allows him to read the chip on his ePassport, including the photo.

Now for the clever bit. Thanks to a software he himself has developed, called RFdump, he downloads the passport's data onto his computer and then onto a blank chip.

Using a standard off-the-shelf component you can just buy at a component store you can have a cloned ePassport in less than five minutes.

[Selatius]

2. Get rid of crap like this, and get rid of REAL ID, period. It is a surrendering of freedom for...

dubious outcomes such as this. It is not a fair trade. Nevermind whether there should even be a trade in the first place, and on that issue I generally lean towards "No!"