Give the back of your passport a few good whacks and hope the feds don't give you 25 years for tampering with a passport.
The State Department asserts that hackers won't find any practical use for data skimmed from RFID chips embedded in the cards, but "if you don't want the cards read, put them in an attenuation sleeve," says John Brennan, a senior policy adviser at the Office of Consular Affairs.Gigi Zenk, a spokeswoman for the Washington state Department of Licensing, says the envelope her state offers with the enhanced driver's license "ensures that nothing can scan it at all."
But that wasn't what researchers from the University of Washington and RSA Laboratories, a data security company in Bedford, Mass., found last year while testing the data security of the cards.
The PASS card "is readable under certain circumstances in a crumpled sleeve," though not in a well maintained sleeve, the researchers wrote in a report.
Another test on the enhanced driver's license demonstrated that even when the sleeve was in pristine condition, a clandestine reader could skim data from the license at a distance of a half yard.
Well well, State Department, here's a sad little communiqué you never expected from the internet: we told you so.
Special alloy sleeves urged to block hackers? [AP via Upgrade: Travel Better]
PREVIOUSLY: HOW TO: Disable RFID in Your New Passport
(Photo: Ryan McFarland)
@Newvox: Seriously? It's about passports and the State Department (now it's Obama's and Clinton's State Department, so you can't pull the political party card) issuing a statement about their supposed security. And you had to go and pull the whole "Bush-Cheney are the devil...burn!" How about you stay on topic and offer some actual commentary thay may help people seeking information?
What a fucking troll. Get a life.
]]>@MooseOfReason: There was a thread a couple of months ago that introduced a webservice that told you when you had replies. Of course, I can't remember anything other than that, but if you're REALLY bored, you can look for it. It was from like April or something. Made it easy, for sure.
]]>I use a faraday cage holder, and when I have to present it I am almost always asked to remove the passport from the otherwise-empty wallet. I am protected everywhere except where I am most vulnerable.
]]>Funny I was thinking of the same exact theme, but you beat me to it. good WORk, & yes I did hammer time my Passport, and nuked it for 15 seconds on medium. It shrivel a tiny, tiny bit...but all good now.
Cheers
]]>Or is this a boon to the terror bomber with OCD? "I want to set up a device that only goes off if there are two Dutch passport holders with a Citibank visa and a copy of "Twilight" in widescreen nearby."
]]>They should change the comment system, and add notification so I don't have to bookmark the articles I've commented on and manually check to see if I have replies.
]]>power corrupts + (bored primates = trouble) = god help us all.
]]>Cool. Thanks!
]]>You can buy tin foil, but it's not available in your local store.
]]>Security concerns were ignored then. RFID has some useful applications, but it's also got tons of privacy and safety issues.
]]>from that page:
"Obama-Time-Travel-Coverup Birthers insist that a giant conspiracy has taken place. The birth certificate showing that Obama was born in Honolulu in August 1961 is fake, they say. Birthers are also certain that some kind of time travel treachery has been undertaken by shadow pinko government agents, who warped themselves back to 1961 to insert notices in the Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star Bulletin saying that "Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama" gave birth to a son on August 4, 1961."
I believe our country reached it's partisan peak during the Presidential Election in 2004. And while it still rears its ugly head I believe the election of President Obama has slowed it down a bit. In may not seem like it at times but I believe all-in-all it is a bit better than it was after the 2004 election.
]]>@CrazyTrain: Because legitimate government agencies with data matched to the RFID chip number do find it useful.
So I can read the number of the RFID chip in your passport, big deal. It is not your SSN, it is not even your passport number. It is simply the serial number of the RFID chip in your passport. Without that data that would correlate that number to your name it is completely useless.
The government has always had that information, if you trusted them with it 10 years ago why not trust them with it now.
I hate to break it to you but new cars give off radio signals in the tire pressure monitoring systems that can be picked up and used to track where you have been going. If you want to be paranoid, be paranoid about something entertaining.
]]>@Bogart's Falcon aka Philly Falcon: Exactly. After eight years, the roles have just reversed. Hell, there were nuts blaming Bush for the weather. The WEATHER!
Those were the nuts on the left, and now the nuts on the right do the same thing. Has our country ever been this partisan?
]]>Maybe, as a security measure, you'd have to SING our anthem.
"I'm sorry, sir, we have to do advance screening. You missed that arpeggio three bars back."
"I've got a cold, dammit"
]]>Thank you, you answered my question.
]]>Is it a little bulge in the booklet? How do you know where to hit?
(I don't have a passport right now so I don't know.)
]]>Not only functional, but not so expensive either:
I think you guys might be over analyzing this. Its not the hackers/crackers/bad guys that want to scan the passports...its our own government.
How much safer we will all be when Policeman do not have to ask for anyone's ID any more, just merely turn on their scanner and automatically see if there are any miscreants around that need arresting.
]]>Personally, I was very happy that I needed to replace my expiring passport in '06 shortly before they started with the chips.
]]>Not that it would stop me from, uh, accidentally jumping up and down on my passport or anything like that.
]]>If I intended to single out a nationality to do them harm I might consider sweeping the area for RFID info, and then see where Americans (or Israelis, or Brits, etc.) congregate. I could then later plan a mass attack (or targeted individual attacks) that's assured of bagging me a few. I don't care what your name is or how tall you are. Just that you're of a certain nationality. It's very convenient that your own governments have seen fit to provide me with this information...
]]>What kind of American are you?
]]>Also, he amusingly has no idea what 'censorship' means.
]]>They also cannot be bothered with the truth.
]]>Fascist was the word you were looking for (or maybe Stalinist), Socialist and Marxist are economic theories. And I defy you to show me the party platform of any Socialist party in Europe and show me how it differs from that of the Democrats.
]]>You can deactivate it yourself with a hammer, microwave or total removal.
]]>@morlo: True if you are talking about a US Citizen at a US Boarder, but teh E-passport is a worlwide effort (ok, US, Canada, Europe and portions of Asia) to push a standardized passport to citizens. With an RFID reader, a boarder protection agent in Germany can verify that the passport is legitamite for a US Citizen, a Canadian Citizen or a Japaneese citizen and they do not need to be given access to the U.S. State department database as all of the information is contained in the passport.
]]>How are you not banned for irrelevance, paranoia, and general douchebaggery yet?
]]>Facebook FTW!
]]>@CrazyTrain: It was my understanding (and I have no information that what I have read from the State Department when I received my passport) that the information on the RFID chip was identical to the information page of your passport which would make it more difficult to counterfeit or alter the passport information page. If this is true, the information on the RFID chip is your name, the state and country you were born in, your date of birth, your sex and a digital photograph.
When you go through Customs in the US, or in countries who have the RFID readers, they can "scan" your passport, and see a digital representation of the information that should be on the passport page. If this does not match, then you get additional screening.
]]>No, wait, that was Bush-Cheney!
Seriously folks, pulling out the Socialist (Marxist, Leninist, whatever) card, is one of the weakest strategies of the Opposition. It just shows the lack direction after Bush-Cheney showed that they really stood for whatever they wanted, and not for a Party, Nation, or ideology.
]]>@aphex242:
I don't think he was...by all appearances, he's actually that stupid.
]]>Answered my own question just by reading more.
]]>So it sounds as if the passport cover has radio-opaque material on it, but passport cards and enhanced drivers licenses don't have such covers.
In other words, you don't need to buy a radio-opaque cover for your passport. Just for your enhanced drivers license or passport card.
]]>@supercereal: It's either Socialist or completely fine (even when it's the exact same thing the last administration did), depending on your political slant.
]]>But hey, since Obama's in office, everything that federal, state, and local governments do is automatically socialist...
]]>It really doesn't take a genius to realize that the protective covers will be useless for anyone that travels more than once during the 5/10 year expiry date (Anybody try reading a paperback book? After a while, the cover will begin to "float"). Not to mention that longer keys will eventually be crackable (in a relatively short amount of time, as technology progresses pretty rapidly).
]]>@Steve Pan: Umm, this started BEFORE Obama was in office and I don't think a Pres would be that involed in such a thing as passport tech. That said the policies of the Obama admin that have been implemented make me cringe...
]]>Aluminum foil and duct tape. It'll block almost anything.
]]>What really makes me annoyed is that people have been pointing out the huge flaws in this idea since it was conceived. The government just sticks their fingers in their ears and ignores it until they can't any longer.
Wasn't there some tech trick of making a folder out of duct tape and tin foil to block the chip?
]]>(I KNOW you can kill the RFID chip effectively this way. And if you do it right the chip won't really burst into flame. I'm more concern about the passport itself. If it is printed with sort of ink containing enough metal particles, microwave it can be a very very bad idea...)
]]>...this is thankfully one of those rare problems that you can solve with a hammer...
Yep. There's an RFID snooper from Russia in the Vienna airport right now with several missing teeth.
]]>