Swedish passport spy chips
p2p news / p2pnet: Sweden is now using national passports, or e-passports, embedded with spy chips.
“Each tag is encoded with the personal details normally included in a passport – height, hair and eye color, and so forth – and with a digital photograph of the owner,” says the RFID Journal.
The chips operate at 13.56 MHz and”comply with the ISO 7816 and ISO 1443A standards,” says the story, going on”
“To prevent a tag from being read from a distance or by unauthorized personnel, each e-passport is printed with a basic access code (BAC). This code must first be read via an optical character recognition (OCR) scanner or typed in manually into the RFID interrogator, which compares the data in the BAC code with that in the RFID tag. If they match, the RFID interrogator will gain access to all information stored on the tag.”
Data on Swedish citizens are entered into a centralized government system and used to produce the e-passport.
Because of concern over potential manipulation of data, “everything is centralized," the story has Bjoern Norinder, sales manager for ACG Identification Technologies, which developed and produced the RFID [Radio Frequency Identification] readers (interrogators) now installed at police stations across Sweden to support the new system.
Some 320 readers, able to “interrogate” not only the e-passports but Sweden’s new national ID cards, and which carry the same RFID tags, have been deployed so far.
"There is no requirement for Swedes to have an ID card," the RFID Journal quotes Norinder as saying, "but the idea is that in future, the card will be able to be used to verify identity when communicating with government agencies."
Sweden is also “assessing bids from RFID suppliers for a project to deploy around 180 interrogators at Swedish consulates and embassies around the world, as a way to improve security and identification at those locations,” says the RFID Journal.
Deployment is expected to start before the end of the year and, “Further incentive for the e-passport deployment came from the U.S. government’s planned US-VISIT (United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology) program,” it adds.
The US-VISIT border security program is full of problems and its fingerprint identification system has, "resulted in many cases of mistaken identity,” says the US Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
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See:-
RFID Journal – Sweden Switches to E-Passports, October 20, 2005
mistaken identity – US-VISIT ‘full of tech problems’, July 10, 2005
