Shockingly Irresponsible Government

I recently had to renew my passport. At first sight I was only unhappy with the photograph on it, because of the new regulations one is not allowed to smile on the photo and look in a certain way it made me look like a gulag prison warden. However the biggest disappointment was the fact that it now contains an RFID chip. This technology is supposed to make border crossings quicker and should prevent forgeries.

Well as a security measure it fails to work, it appears to be a 5 minute job to clone a passport. In response to this news a spokesman said: "It is hard to see why anyone would want to access the information on the chip.” Well now any gulag prison warden may use a copy of my passport, oh swell.

Of course anyone who cares to find out knows that the RFID chip should communicate over short distances but will readily work over a distance of meters.

This new feature also makes me less secure. Even if one does not want to decrypt what is on the passport one would like to know which nationality is passing by, e.g. to explode a targeted bomb.

So we are now issued with an identity document that if we should not carry it with us at all times we are obliged to carry it with us all the time when we travel abroad. To anyone who cares to make a study of the possibilities the new features in this document make me less secure because I may become a target for terrorist attack or identity theft.

To come back to the spokesman, it is easy to see why someone wants to access that chip! In fact the chances that this will be abused are about a 100%, considering the number of passports handed out, carelessness of its carriers and the rewards inherent in abusing the data.

The government does not seem to care or even understand that in an attempt to make its citizens more secure they actually made them less safe! I find this shocking.

Next they will probably want to include RFID chips in money to make it less forgeable, allowing any mugger to carefully select the victims to the ones actually carrying a lot of money, by reading and counting the RFID tags on the victim’s banknotes.

I already ordered my own RFID blocking passport sleeve to protect me from my well-meaning government….

UPDATE: I have not heard from my order at difrwear. Mails are unanswered, looks to me this company is defunct. Let's see if I can get my money back....