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Tin Foil Passports?
Daedala writes "The debate over contactless chips with biometric information in passports continues. Vendors have been chosen for testing in the U.S. and Australia. Privacy advocates are still arguing about the measure, as are security reporters and bloggers. The specs themselves are interesting, to say the least. The EETimes says that in interoperability tests, the potential chips could be read from 30 feet away. However, both they and the New York Times have published articles reporting vendors' low-cost solution: '[I]incorporate a layer of metal foil into the cover of the passport so it could be read only when opened.' Don't they know that the whole tinfoil hat thing is supposed to be a joke?"
That in about 5 years or so they'll implement this technology and we'll see a story, "Identity Theft On The Rise As Biometrics Are Stolen From Traveller's Passports".
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
why do they need to read passports from miles away?
The whole point of the biometrics (even the lowly photography) is that you confirm the data in the passport with the person in front of you at a booth as you check everyone as they go through.
There is no reason to broadcast this info at ALL.
It's like having two computers next to each other (2 meters apart) in a "security" installation and using 2 wifi cards to link them instead of cat5.
1) it's more expensive to use wifi
2) you have no need to broadcast due to range
3) not only do you not need to, there are now a pile of security problems you have to deal with which aren't needed.
When will these fucktards learn to stop pissing taxpayers money away on "futurists" to help enslave us with at worst crappy overbearing over intrusive government leaning toward fascism, at the least they are wasting our money and enslaving us with red tape.
Your proposal makes FAR too much sense to ever be implemented by a government.
Just zap that little chip
either as a social protest, or just to convert it back to a paper-based document.
Huh? Correct me if I'm wrong, but according to my 4.5 years of EE, Faraday cages work on the principal of Gauss' Law. That is, no EM field can be present inside because there is no charge inside. Wikipedia seems to agree with me.
So where does all this discussion of grounding come in? Googling for Faraday cage brings up this detailed article about building one, but it doesn't mention grounding either.
This page mentions grounding, but only in relations to the instruments, not the table. And this humorous article says grounding is only required if you have to have edges on your cage (we could design passport books so the edges are metal contacts).
I'd be more concerned with whether tin foil is a sufficient conductor for the higher frequencies.