October 27, 2006
The Effect Of RFID Passports On Hollywood
As I write this, I'm watching the season premiere of the T&A jiggle show Las Vegas, which has a healthy dose of drama thrown in. It suddenly struck me that had this episode been written a few months from now, how different it might have been. One of the main characters, Ed Deline - played by James Caan - is a casino boss. He's also a former CIA operative , or something to that effect.
Shortly after being shot and having a heart attack scare only a few hours before his daughter's wedding, he's visited in the hospital by two members of the CIA. In his normal bullheadedness, he takes off to London. Fast forward to a scene of him in a bank, where he's greeted by a different name. He then opens a safe-deposit box that has a couple of stacks of British Pounds and what appears to be a couple of dozen passports. Tossing his passport into the box, he pulls out another one. Fast forward. He gets off a plane, hands over a passport. The uniformed customs agent opens it to reveal a picture of Deline, but greets him with a different name.
Now if you haven't already figured out what I'm getting at, here it is. If e-passports get implemented worldwide, or at least in the countries that are trading partners of the United States, as the current administration wants, then scriptwriters need a whole new education in e-passports. Most spy stories would cease to make sense to anyone who knows about an e-passport. Granted, having a passport does not mean that you would be visiting a country where they can actually read the RFID chip. As well, when you are a former military operative, you probably have ways to get fake passports with fake data on the RFID chip. At least in fiction.
The oddest thing about this episode, however, is that the show has an extremely high-tech bent, and yet they completely ignored the concept of an e-passport. Maybe scriptwriters are amongst those who are hoping the e-passport doesn't go through - despite the unlikelihood of that, even with all the supposed evidence that there are some serious privacy and security flaws.
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