U.S. Biometric Passports By Late 2004

Posted by michael on Tuesday July 22, 2003 @06:20AM from the papers-please dept.

truthsearch writes "The Register is reporting 'Current plans call for the new passport books to include a contactless smart chip based on the 14443 standard, with a minimum of 32 Kbytes of EEPROM storage. The chip will contain a compressed full-face image for use as a biometric. European biometric passports, by contrast, are planned to feature both retinal and fingerprint recognition biometrics on their smart cards.' How they tie this to '9/11 fears' is curious considering the hijackers had valid paperwork."

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Re:False Privacy by CracktownHts · 2003-07-22 06:36 · Score: 5, Interesting

Right on. My passport (US) has a digitized photo anyway, so I would assume my digital mug is floating around in a Federal computer system somewhere. Given that airlines generally (if not universally) maintain passport numbers in the passenger manifest of any flight in and out of this country, it's a trivial matter to have the pictures up and ready when the flight lands at its port of entry.
The European scheme, with fingerprints and retinal scans, would disturb me a bit more if I were subject to it.