As we reported on last week on the electronic passports in the US we now find the Irish passports have gone RFID. These passports can be read at a distance and thereby can comply with US regulations for their waiver program. Now, this is where it gets good. This past summer we found that the RFID passports were problematic with respects to security. The Irish have taken that a little farther,
But unlike the RFID passports the USA is now issuing, the Irish ones lack a security feature preventing them from being skimmed, or read surreptitiously.
Um, yeah, see that’s bad.
The US government has gone to the trouble of fitting its passports with a layer of foil that interferes with skimming attempts when the document is closed. The Irish government has not. A local lobbying outfit called Digital Rights Ireland (DRI) has complained that the new passports are ripe for remote privacy invasion. As of course they are.
This article over on The Register UK goes into this at length. Be sure to read the full piece after the jump.
[tags]RFID, Passport, Information Skimming, Data Theft, Privacy, Irish Passports[/tags]
