December 30, 2006

Options For Disabling Your E-Passport's Chip?

A couple of weeks ago, there were a couple of articles around the blogosphere talking about how to disable the RFID chip in your new e-passport. Engadget has a great photograph of a simple, low-tech option. Now, while one article said that a passport is still valid even with a disabled chip, The Inquirer says that a tampered passport might get you "25 years in prison and a special customs search with rubber gloves.

Damned if you do and damned if you don't. The security issues have yet to be resolved and might be worse than formerly thought. Two European tech consultants found that cloned e-passport data can be purchased on the Internet. Not only that, the RFID reader they bought on eBay had a blank chip and software for cloning and copying the data onto the chip.

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