Slashdot Mirror
Disabling the RFID in the New U.S. Passports
slashchuck writes "Along with the usual Jargonwatch and Wired/Tired articles, the January issue of Wired offers a drastic method for taking care of that RFID chip in your passport. They say it's legal ... if a bit blunt. From the article: 'The best approach? Hammer time. Hitting the chip with a blunt, hard object should disable it. A nonworking RFID doesn't invalidate the passport, so you can still use it.' "
Well, it remains to be seen just how reliable (or otherwise) these things are ... my feeling is that there's going to be a substantial failure rate. It's one thing to require RFID to speed the process of verifying an identity or to make it nominally more accurate. However, if you invalidate a passport because of a malfunctioning chip you're going to have BIG problems. People sit on things, they flex them, they drop things on them, they otherwise break them. It's what people do, whether they mean to or not.
Let's face it, you're gonna see a certain percentage of RFID passports that just don't work, for whatever reason. What do you do? Lock those people up? No, you just treat the passport like a traditional non-RFID-equipped passport. Well, if you're a properly-trained security person maybe you actually look at the traveler and make sure the picture matches. Maybe you do your job, because if the RFID isn't working you can't just doze through the interview and let the machine do the work. You should be on your toes anyway, because the one time you aren't is when the technology will let you down. And they (yes, they) know that.
And you can bet your boots that any (ahem!) undesirables will have properly-functioning RFIDs anyway. As always, it's us ordinary folk that will get busted for not dotting our I's and crossing our T's (not that most of us have any way to test the goddamn things anyway, except by trying to travel somewhere and seeing what happens.)
Personally, I think the Feds ought to focus more on people skills (i.e., well-trained, well-paid security forces with an effective organization to back them) and less on failure-prone, unproven technology.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
That's not the question. I don't think our Federal Government is as much concerned about "proving" things as it should be, not anymore. The real question is: what is the penalty for being accused of tampering with your passport.
I would think that "tampering" would be more along the lines of "falsification". Destroying the RFID is really more defacement than tampering. At worst that would make the tag useless, at best make it more secure, and only means the passport works the way passports have always worked, requiring visual identification. It doesn't give the holder a different ID or allow him to do anything he otherwise could not.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Since we determined that radio is used to power the tags, everyone with a basic understanding of physics should know that the field strength diminishes with something like x^-3 and not y^-x, which would make it a cube law matter, and not exponential. Additionally, the same directional antenna that can be used to read the tag's signal can be used to direct the radiated RF energy to the tag.
Sorry, but that's wrong again. RFID tags only send an answer when they are specifically addressed. The inventory control tags allow for a binay search to find all tags, e.g. you start by asking if any tag have addresses <2^31. If any answer, you check < 2^30 and between 2^31 and 2^30, etc. until you know the individual addresses of all tags in your range. Only after you have the right adress you will start actually reading their data, anything before that is just to detect their presence. Whether or not passport tags even give away their presence if one doesn't provide the (printed) secret key in the request, I do not know.
took me some time to grasp the advantage. I think the obvious advantage of the rfid chip is for the entering country to keep a complete record for post/off site processing. It does no good to the US customs for US citizens to give back the info. We already have that in our databases, + more for anyone "interesting" just from their SSN.
Essentially the RFID passport is a Tit for Tat jester. To tell the EU, etc we'll force our citizens to give you their data in a nice tight bundle, so that you will return the favor with your citizens data on Entry to the US.
obviously easier for a untrained agent to beam all passport data to a offsite FBI agent, then you can have one central surveillance office.