A new high-tech passport era is dawning.
Starting toward the end of this year and progressing through next, the new generation of passports issued by the State Department will be electronic.
E-passports, as they are called, are not to be confused with airline e-tickets, which are merely a piece or pieces of paper. E-passports will look much the same as today's machine-readable passports with the familiar gold-embossed blue cover.
But the e-passports will contain an electronic chip with uniquely encoded biometric information (a facial photograph) and a coil, or antenna, if you will, embedded in the back cover. The chip will duplicate the information that's on the passport's data page -- digitized photo, name, birth date, place of birth, nationality and the like.
The e-passport also will incorporate codes and additional anti-fraud and security features. With today's thin technology, the chip, coil and metallic security shield will not add any detectable thickness to the cover.
The United States and 27 visa-waiver countries -- mainly Western European nations along with Australia and Japan that reciprocally don't require visas of American citizens -- are in the vanguard of moving into the electronic passport era.
In 2002, the U.S. enacted the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act, which required these countries to issue biometric passports by Oct. 27, 2006. The International Civil Aviation Organization, which sets international standards for passports as well as customs and immigration matters, called for a chip that could store a digital photo, iris scan and fingerprint. The U.S. passport will carry only a digital photo, while other countries might add a fingerprint.
Developing a secure e-passport has not been without problems. The biggest difficulties have centered on privacy issues caused by the way the ICAO specifications were presented, according to Neville Pattinson, director of business development, technology and government affairs for Axalto, a technology firm in Austin, Texas, that is developing an e-passport.
"The specs allowed the information in the passport to be read without any security access controls," he said.
Axalto, said to be the world's leading provider of microprocessor cards, is one of three finalists bidding for the passport chip contract, and it works with several federal agencies on identity management, security and biometrics.
