The U.S. Department of State (DOS) has announced plans to begin issuing electronic passports embedded with RFID chips.


By 2017, the government expects all American e-passports will eventually include RFID chips containing personal information, says Anna Hinken, a spokesperson for the DOS' Bureau of Consular Affairs.


All American passports, she says, have a maximum 10-year validity, and the DOS plans to transfer all passport production to e-passports by 2007, so by 2017, all U.S. passports in use will have embedded RFID chips. In October 2004, the DOS began testing e-passports in an eight-week trial program (see U.S. Tests E-Passports).
It started issuing e-passports to diplomats in December 2005, Hinken says, followed by government officials and their families in April 2006. Starting the week of Aug. 14, the DOS plans to begin issuing tourist e-passports for the general populace.



In January of this year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) instituted a separate three-month trial to test the RFID technology underlying e-passports (see DHS Testing E-Passports in San Francisco), and in April, it started selecting interrogators and inlays for use in the eventual widespread deployment (see DHS Completes E-Passport Test at SFO). The US-VISIT Program, meanwhile, is testing RFID tags embedded in I-94A forms issued to visitors with nonimmigrant visas (see DHS Testing Tags for US-VISIT Program).

"By Oct. 26, 2006," explains US-VISIT's Kimberly Weissman, "Visa Waiver countries must begin issuing e-passports, so any traveler who wants to travel under the VWP must have an e-passport."

The e-passports can be read approximately 4 inches from a scanner. The passive 64-kilobyte RFID tags in the passports is being supplied by Infineon Technologies' San Jose, Calif., subsidiary and Amsterdam-based Gemalto.


The e-passports meet specifications laid down by the Montreal-based International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a United Nations standards body that has urged its 189 member countries to adopt machine-readable, electronically enabled passports by 2010.


Source: RFID Journal