Notes from the Electronic Cottage 08/17/06

Host/Producer: Jim Campbell
Topic: The U.S. is now issuing spanking new passports – with RFID chips in them. The State Department swears these new passports are full of all sorts of security measures which makes it impossible to copy them, skim information from them, or do anything else that might shake our confidence in the usefulness of devices that may one day store not only our pictures and personal information, but also our fingerprints, iris scans and DNA profiles. But guess what? On almost the same day that the U.S. posted all those reassuring (as long as you don’t mind being chipped like cattle) words, there was a demonstration of how to clone an RFID passport. Feel more secure?