U.S. government does not do enough to assuage public concerns about e-passports
The inexorable march toward U.S. e-passports continues, but a research firm says the administration has not done a good job assuaging public concerns about security and privacy issues
Fueled by inaccurate speculation, a tide of popular anxiety is rising about the security of the new e-passports the United States government will begin issuing to its citizens next month. Oyster Bay, New York-based ABI Research believes that DHS should speak out to reassure the public about the safety of the contactless technologies at the heart of the electronic travel documents.
ABI’s RFID industry analyst Sara Shah says that “there are uneducated claims being made by some privacy advocates. They make claims such as, ‘if you have a contactless chip in your passport they can track you everywhere and they’ll know everything about you.’ This is simply not true, and the DHS should publicly explain what the technology is capable of, and why it is secure.” Not all those who question the appropriateness of contactless technology for personal identification are so extreme. The Emerging Applications and Technology Subcommittee of the DHS’s Full Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee recently issued a draft report which stated, “RFID appears to offer little benefit when compared to the consequences it brings for privacy and data integrity…we recommend that RFID be disfavored for identifying and tracking human beings.”
In response, the Smart Card Alliance pointed out that not all RFID systems are alike, and that the DHS committee should “include these differences clearly within the (final) report and conduct separate analyses of contactless smart cards and longer-range RFID technology.”
