The Foreign Service Journal, December 2005

front burner when two giants in the logistics industry — the U.S. Department of Defense and Wal-Mart — man- dated its use in their operations. Today RFID tags are already used to speed transac- tions at the point of sale, track livestock and pets, increase highway throughput, label shipping containers and gain entrance to buildings, to name just a few applications. Pharmaceutical companies are beginning to adopt the technology to prevent counterfeiting of drugs. With the introduction of biometric passports, the State Depart- ment, too, is beginning to use RFID. Understanding how the technology works is important to Foreign Service officers as well as to the general pub- lic (see “How It Works,” p. 32). Adoption and imple- mentation of the new e-passports, or “electronic pass- ports,” though important in its own right, presage debates and projects to come, where technology breakthroughs will both challenge and facilitate the delicate balance between individual privacy and state security. The Biometric Passport U.S. passports are a valuable commodity to many around the world. Deputy Secretary for Consular Affairs Frank Moss testified on June 22 that 8.8 million applica- tions were processed in the last fiscal year — up 22 per- cent from the year before. He stated that his office expects 10 million to be processed by the end of FY 2005. To provide enhanced security in the post-9/11 era, the U.S. passport has been undergoing changes. To prevent fraud, new artwork is visible only under ultraviolet light. Additionally, this next generation of the U.S. passport includes biometric technology that will further support border security goals. Without question, biometrics will strengthen U.S. border security by ensuring that the person carrying a U.S. passport is the person to whom the Department of State issued that passport. The biographic data page, which includes the bearer’s digitized photo, has been moved to an interior page, and the data is replicated in a contactless chip implanted in the back cover. The data in the integrated circuit is checked by an inspector with an RFID reader. If the data page and the chip data are not the same, the individual bearing the passport is subjected to further ID checks. Traditionally, facial recognition has been used to dif- ferentiate among humans. Other human physiological or behavioral characteristics that scientists and technologists have been studying include the unique pattern of the iris, the retina, ear, voice, gait, palm and finger tip. In the first generation of the e-passport, which Congress ordered to be fully implemented by October 2006, the biometric data is limited to the bearer’s photo. It is quite likely that second-generation U.S. e-passports will add iris scans (but not fingerprints, primarily because the iris scans have a higher accuracy rate and require less storage space). The specifications for the new U.S. e-passports are governed to some extent by the Enhanced Border Secur- ity and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002, which requires border entry documents to be machine-readable “con- taining biometric identifiers” and to be in compliance with the International Civil Aeronautics Organization standards. ICAO determined in 2002 that facial features, fingerprints and iris recognition are all applicable to machine-readable travel documents. The European- based agency designated facial recognition as the pre- ferred biometric, and characterized the latter two as additional options. ICAO also selected contactless inte- grated circuits as the best means of implementing the biometrics data standard. Pilot Testing Tests began in mid-2005 on the first generation of bio- metric passports. Partnering with Department of Home- land Security border officials, the State Department con- ducted a field test with Australia and New Zealand, issu- ing approximately 250 of the new U.S. passports to a few airline crews (United Airlines, Qantas and Air New Zealand). The test compared the e-passports of all three countries. In January 2006, Singapore plans to test one thousand of its e-passports issued to Singapore Airlines crews at U.S. borders and in Changi Airport. In the next step of the pilot program, beginning in early 2006, diplo- matic and government employee passports will receive the chips. Both the midpoint report during the first phase of the trinational test and the final report at its conclusion found F O C U S 30 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 5 Emily Sopensky was the 2004 Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers-USA Fellow to the U.S. State Department, where she worked with the Office of eDiplomacy in the Bureau of Information Resource Management and with the SMART project. She is a business consultant, specializing in technology.