I recently renewed my passport as part of the Renew for Freedom campaign by the nice folks at No2ID. The point of this was to partly avoid being forced into getting an ID card in a few years when my passport really did expire, but mainly to avoid getting put on the National Identity Register.
But the card is not the point. Even if you chose not to have it, you would still have to pay for it. And you will get no choice about attending an official interview, producing numerous personal documents to be recorded, and having your fingerprints and eye scans taken for the records.
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Once you are on the Register, you will never get off until it is abolished. But you’ll be exposed to all the risks and dangers of the scheme immediately. The Home Office is building the most complex and intrusive ID control system in the world. Given their atrocious track record, it will certainly go wrong.
So I avoided being put on the Register, but I did notice that my new passport has laminated into the back page a small chip and several loops of antenna wire. It also came with a leaflet entitled “New biometric passport Essential Information”. It says:
You have just received a new biometric passport, also known as the ePassport.
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We are introducing this new style of passport to help fight fraud and forgery.
My first instinct was to put my passport in the microwave and see what happened. But:
If your passport or the chip in it gets damaged, it may prevent you from travelling and you may need to get a replacement passport.
In any case, I’m not terribly concerened.
The chip stores a copy of your photo and the personal details printed on page 31. There is no extra personal information in the machine-readable zone or on the chip.
Technically I suppose I should worry about what extra information might be on there or that might be added in future that I’m not told about, but I don’t believe the government are quite that competent. I’m more concerned about terrorists reading my nationality from my passport from a distance.
But this, which I saw linked in my No2ID newsletter, is just hilarious, given that the stated purpose of the chip is to “help fight fraud and forgery”:
A German computer security consultant has shown that he can clone the electronic passports that the United States and other countries are beginning to distribute this year.
So much for that, then. Here’s the money quote, from Gus Hosein, interviewed for the Wired article:
Either this guy is incredible or this technology is unbelievably stupid. I think it’s a combination of the two. Is this what the best and the brightest of the world could come up with? Or is this what happens when you do policy laundering and you get a bunch of bureaucrats making decisions about technologies they don’t understand?
To be fair, it has only be shown possible to clone a passport so far — so the copy will retain the original photo. And if the chip also contained fingerprints such a clone would be of limited use. But it remains for now quite straightforward to make a copy of a passport.
I renewed mine last years because the timeline did say any after November or something would have the chip and the phot would be scanned into an ID system. Mine does not have a chip.
I don’t know what I will do when it runs out. By then if things go on as they have I’ll have left this disney country for good.