'The Paper Passport Is Dying' (wired.com) 80
Facial recognition technology is poised to replace traditional passports globally, marking the biggest shift in travel documentation since World War 1. Airports across Finland, Canada, Netherlands, UAE, UK, Italy, US, and India are testing passport-free systems, with Singapore already implementing the technology for its residents and departing visitors.
The systems typically store passport data digitally on smartphones, using face recognition cameras at airports to match travelers against stored photos. Singapore officials report over 1.5 million people have used their system, while Finnish trials showed identity checks taking just eight seconds.
The systems typically store passport data digitally on smartphones, using face recognition cameras at airports to match travelers against stored photos. Singapore officials report over 1.5 million people have used their system, while Finnish trials showed identity checks taking just eight seconds.
Sure it is (Score:5, Interesting)
If this were true, then the $30 ‘passport card’ would be more useful. As it is the $130 passport is still required, not only to regain entry into the USA, but in most foreign countries to gain access. Theres a US passport app currently. Its not accepted anywhere. Theres been a policy that on some Caribbean cruises, all you need is a photo ID and a valid birth certificate. However, should anything happen during your cruise that requires you to disembark (like a medical emergency) in a foreign country, you cant get back into the united states. You are stuck for an extended period working things out with the American consulate. Digital passports eliminating a paper passport wont be a thing until every single country accepts them. That means they also have to interface for the VISA system in each country to accept them and ‘stamp’ them.
Re:Sure it is (Score:4, Funny)
And how do you tuck your bribe into an electronic passport?
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And how do you tuck your bribe into an electronic passport?
Venmo
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And how do you tuck your bribe into an electronic passport?
It would be in-app, like tipping in Uber. There is already a Treasury-IRS euphemism for overseas bribery, "Facilitating payments" on your corporate reporting.
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Re:Sure it is (Score:5, Interesting)
I travel all the time too. You cannot stamp your visa into a digital passport. You are also still required to carry the paper version. Coming off a cruise they use facial recognition to speed up the line. It always fails for me. I always have to go see an agent for physical verification. Every. Single. Time. Some central american countries require your paper passport just to leave and reenter the peer your ship is docked.
There is no way a universal passport software system is ever going to exist. That involves giving every country equal access so they can alter your record in order to notate your Visa should you want to stay somewhere like Chile for a couple weeks. Do you really think giving N Korea unfettered access to your nations passport system is a good idea? How fast would a few thousand spies suddenly be working inside your borders for industrial espionage? What possibly could go wrong with an all electronic system of identification? The more electronic things become, the bigger and more frequent things like fraud occur. 30yr ago, in order to defraud some elderly person out of their savings you had to spend months on a long con to swindle them. The more digital things are getting the less secure they get. Take the pig butchering scam for example. Fake market apps for digital currency that look legit. Because its an app people just assume it is legitimate.
Until every single country on the planet takes a digital passport, carrying and having issued a paper passport is still required. Even if you get fast passed through the checkpoint.
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Re:Sure it is (Score:5, Interesting)
next time leave your passport at home and see what happens. ater all the article is saying that a physical paper passport is soon to no longer exist. By your own admission you are still carrying your passport. Thats your backup to the fast-pass. I'll believe one day there wont be a physical passport right after everyone is using Linux on the desktop and we are all getting power from cold fusion.
If you get stopped by the police they are going to want to see some form of ID. If its foreign they are then going to ask for your passport. No physical copy? Come down to the station while we sort this out. That's a headache no one needs. We cant even board a domestic flight without a physical RealID here in the USA and that entire record is online accessed by the 'barcode' on the back. You still need the actual physical copy to fly. Either that or a physical passport. Check into a hospital and they need your passport. I don't mean sick-call but a real hospital stay in a foreign country.
Take a situation where there is an incident involving the police. You aren't involved, but they aren't absolutely certain, and they need you to stick around for questioning. Traditionally they will take your passport so you can't flee the country. How is that going to work if its all in the cloud?
There is a huge step between scanning your passport (or using a chip) with a follow-up of facial recognition, and not having a physical copy of the passport entirely. I don't see countries stopping the issuing of paper passports occuring anytime within my lifetime. It would take the act of an authority higher than any country to mandate it for it to have a global effect. Unless we suddenly get conquered by aliens from another planet that implements their own identification system, there are too many banana republics that are not going to spend money rolling this out. If you think central and south america would be a problem, try some of the smaller and poorer places in Africa.
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> Take a situation where there is an incident involving
> the police. You aren't involved, but they aren't
> absolutely certain, and they need you to stick around
> for questioning. Traditionally they will take your
> passport so you can't flee the country. How is that
> going to work if it's all in the cloud?
The solution is simple.
If, as you say, you are not guilty of the crime; the police can go pound sand and stick their questions where the sun don't shine. They're not (supposed to be) hara
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uhh i take it you don't really travel. See how well that works in Mexico, Panama, Ecuador, Columbia, etc. See how well that works in the Congo, Rwanda, or any other african country that has doctors without borders operating inside it. There is a huge difference between what you think 'the police should not be allowed to do' and what they actually do. Your opinion means fuck-all in the face of reality. And for these reasons alone, many countries are not going to allow you to travel there without a physical c
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So, tl;dr: Corrupt scumbag government workers are corrupt scumbags. It that supposed to be news to... well... anyone? Also what do biometrics have to do with corrupt cops who think that Judge Dredd and the Punisher are "how to" manuals?
Do you just meekly accept *every* abuse and broken system as permanently inevitable and impossible to ever fix?
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not going to discuss this with some newbie that never goes anywhere exotic. you can take your principles and shove them up your ass. Thats not how the real world works. They likely will shove more than your principles up your ass. When you are in another country you have no rights. You are at the mercy of how they do business. Go ahead and dig your heels in. Its only going to be worse for you. Sometimes your best option is keep your head down, bribe whoever the fuck you have to and get the fuck out of the c
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not going to discuss this with some newbie
SvnLyrBrto's UID is 62138. Yours is 947977.
Who's the newbie here?
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Just WTF crawled up your ass? You're raging across this whole discussion at people for suggesting perfectly workable solutions to the problem with these "try it and find out, moron" posts when not a one of us have claimed that any of the fixes have yet been implemented. This deficiencies in the old-school paper passport system are not insurmountable. They'd actually be a fairly easy engineering fix. The only thing lacking is political will. And, again, not one of has claimed that the political will to imple
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I was actually wondering if this was Dr.Bob / jcr in disguise...
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If you get stopped by the police they are going to want to see some form of ID. If it's foreign they are then going to ask for your passport. No physical copy? Come down to the station while we sort this out.
This fall the little auto insurance cards you have to keep in your glove compartment went digital with my policy. Now the latest one is in my phone wallet, available whether or not I have a signal at the place of need. No more having to scramble through a glove compartment full of obsolete coverage cars to find the current one.
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Take a situation where there is an incident involving the police. You aren't involved, but they aren't absolutely certain, and they need you to stick around for questioning. Traditionally they will take your passport so you can't flee the country. How is that going to work if its all in the cloud?
Take Johnny Somali's case. South Korea seized his passport since he's involved in a criminal case, so he applied for an emergency passport at his consulate and actually obtained one, likely lying on the request form for it. Guess where he's still stuck though?
A passport is a form of identification, not an automatic permission to cross borders. South Korea's immigration definitely has the information in their system that a particular individual is not allowed to leave the country, regardless of the forms of
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thats prettymuch my point. You might see some specific use cases but the day when you apply for a passport and its entirety is purely digital with no physical media at all is decades down the road. Im 54. I expect that I likely have maybe 30 years left on this blue marble at best. Thats assuming no accidents, no wars, etc. In those 30 years I predict that people will still be issued a paper passport because not every place and every cop is going to be tied into the passport system. Hell china isnt a 3rd wor
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The paper passport is already not needed in some cases, e.g. I think citizen of US do not need a passport to visit Canada; and for what I know nationals of France can travel with a picture ID to Turkey, Egypt (+ Tunisia until this end of year) and the entire European continent (non-EU places: Georgia, Moldova, Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania, Serbia, Montenegro). These are official directives corresponding to international agreements. Right now this works with the paper/plastic national ID cards, but I don't see w
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According to Wikipedia, the French paper card is also valid in several Caribbean islands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Next time you're travelling internationally and return to Europe, check out where the people without EU passports go. Despite having electronic passports (the passport has a chip and I have an electronic version on my phone) the EU still requires people to hand over a paper passport and get a stamp.
In the US I can just walk through a line and look at a machine without needing to take my passport out at all.
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It's not on the passport provider to provide the visa. It's up to the country that accepts the person holding the passport.
So the issuing country only need to know the information about the passport holder, such as their document ID and then then they can verify that at the port of arrival.
All digital passports aka Biometric Passports, and by this I mean US, UK, EU, Canada, Australia, New Zealand all have embedded digital passports in their physical passports and have done for 10 or more years now.
There's n
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physical passport forgery requires a high level of skill. Electronic forgery is about as easy as any other electronic hack. But thats not even the point. So long as a single country is too poor or chooses not to deal with electronic documents, you will be issued a paper document. The days where you will never ever ever get issued a paper document are as far off as cold fusion and the year of the linux desktop. There is always going to be a physical passport or a physical copy of an ID. Its always going to b
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> Electronic forgery is about as easy as any other electronic hack
You've managed to forge RSA? You've broken all PKI? Including post quantum? That's not an "easy electronic hack" you've just fundamentally broken any kind of trust and security we have on the internet. So I'm calling BS on that one.
Physical passport forgery requires the chip in your passport to not work so that it's not a second source to be verified against.
If you look at the list of countries who are enrolled for biometric passports, it'
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there is no physical chip in my passport. there is no physical chip in the passport of passports issued by a lot of countries.
> If you look at the list of countries who are enrolled for biometric passports, it's pretty much everyone. Sure, there might be a paper backup document which is issued in case you lose your phone, but like Google Pay / Wallet and Apple Pay everyone is using their mobile phone these days.
everyone? bullshit. Do you even know how many countries there are on this planet? By everyone
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
That's pretty much everyone.
If you look back at my comment, I said that they can leverage the existing platform to provide identity control.
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fuck around and find out. I double dog dare you to travel WITHOUT your physical passport. See how that works out. Make sure to get in an accident in mexico and not have travel insurance too. See what happens if you have no paper passport and cannot pay your bill up front. If you have no passport to surrender your next call will be to the consulate.
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When digital passports are made public (Which they aren't at the moment) I happily will.
In the same way that if I lost my card, I'd have to call my bank, if I lost my phone (Or my physical passport!) I'd still have to call the consulate... So yeah, sure, not a bother. That's the point.
At that point, I might have to get an emergency passport (Which don't have chips typically) to get home, or just buy a replacement phone and download my passport and off I go again!
I don't see why you're being so argumentative
Re: Sure it is (Score:2)
It is a huge pain to get a replacement passport, and you have to supply documentation to do so. Why should a replacement digital passport be any easier to obtain?
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I never said it should be. At this stage, if I've lost my phone it would make sense that I need to phone the consulate and have my old passport revoked as it was stored on there. What they do then is a risk decision based upon the issuing government.
Once I've done that, (I would assume) I need to prove my identity through copies of my old passport, biometrics or whatever the embassy / consulate / high commission needs to prove my identity, before I can download another one. By the time that they implement a
Re: Sure it is (Score:2)
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leave your passport at home next time.. see how it works out for you. The entire point of the article is that soon there wont be a physical paper passport even issued. Thats going to happen right after we get cold fusion.
Re: Sure it is (Score:2)
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It has NOT already been done. Carrying the physical passport is STILL required. Until the day you dont have a physical passport issued, nothing has already been done.
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So why is your argument to leave your passport at home next time if you know it hasn't already been done?
Re: Sure it is (Score:2)
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sorry, I thought you said it had been done. As long as countries require a paper passport, even a small handful, there will always be a paper passport issued. In some cases the country wants the assurances that they can confiscate your document and hold you for a short period of time. So some countries are always going to be the holdout. Cold fusion seems more likely than a completely paperless society. If they were really interested in all electronic documentation this whole RealID thing would not be nearl
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I travel a lot to the US from the EU, all you need is an ESTA, no passport stamping.
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https://travel.state.gov/conte... [state.gov] one example where you cant even go there without two full empty pages on your passport. also says Tourist Visa required.
https://www.visaforchina.cn/CB... [visaforchina.cn]
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This is one of the few good applications of a Blockchain. Allow countries to add entries to your passport electronic record, in a way that only allows for additions, in chronological order. No ability to modify data, only add entries.
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nice paragraphs
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If this were true, then the $30 ‘passport card’ would be more useful. As it is the $130 passport is still required, not only to regain entry into the USA, but in most foreign countries to gain access. Theres a US passport app currently. Its not accepted anywhere. Theres been a policy that on some Caribbean cruises, all you need is a photo ID and a valid birth certificate. However, should anything happen during your cruise that requires you to disembark (like a medical emergency) in a foreign country, you cant get back into the united states. You are stuck for an extended period working things out with the American consulate. Digital passports eliminating a paper passport wont be a thing until every single country accepts them. That means they also have to interface for the VISA system in each country to accept them and ‘stamp’ them.
This, a passport's primary purpose is to get access to other countries, this means that it needs to be in a format accepted by most other countries. This would be ICAO Doc 9303 Machine Readable Travel Documents. Right now we can't even get everyone on board with the well established biometric passport (and trust me America, you want to get on board with this... I land at Heathrow and am kerbside within 30 mins thanks to no lines at the automated immigration gates). The biometric format is also defined in Do
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If this were true, then the $30 ‘passport card’ would be more useful. As it is the $130 passport is still required, not only to regain entry into the USA, but in most foreign countries to gain access. Theres a US passport app currently. Its not accepted anywhere. Theres been a policy that on some Caribbean cruises, all you need is a photo ID and a valid birth certificate. However, should anything happen during your cruise that requires you to disembark (like a medical emergency) in a foreign country, you cant get back into the united states.
Technically speaking, you can always return to the U.S. with proof of citizenship and identity (a government-issued photo ID and a birth certificate), but you have to come back by land or sea, not by air, which can be challenging, because you can't get into Canada or Mexico without a passport. In fact, the only countries that will allow you to enter are all islands, none of which have land access to the U.S.
That said, if you are in the Caribbean, you could likely take an inter-island ferry to the U.S. Virg
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I read a lot of stories in the travel news outlets where someone used the birth certificate for travel and had a medical emergency and was totally fucked. Its totally not worth that gamble. Then there is the whole 'either surrender your passport or be held in jail' thing that could totally suck if you didnt have a passport. Im not saying that is a likely scenario but how does it go? Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
Its like the idiots that decide not to get travel insurance and
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I just double checked with my wife who is a travel agent as a side hustle. If you travel with a birth certificate you MUST enter and leave the US from the exact same port. You cannot do a cruise in Alaska where you leave seattle and then disembark in Skagway even though both are in the United States. .In fact when that bridge collapsed in Baltimore they had to divert a couple cruise ships. The people using birth certificates were fucked. It was a major delay for them. They had to wait for a special exemptio
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There is absolutely NO WAY I am going to trust my smartphone to act as my passport. Low battery, failed update, any number of other tech woes are just too frequent to allow me to trust my travel documents to any electronic gadget. I'll always carry a paper passport and printed copies of any visas/declarations.
Yes, I'm a retired Boomer engineer, and I know only too well how things can go wrong at the worst possible time. And being rejected at immigration when my smartphone won;t work the way they need it to
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the passport card is very limited in where it works though. Im not sure it provides much more function than a RealID. I know that for cruising its not an option in a lot of circumstances.
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The US passport card is limited because it's not a ICAO 9303 compliant identity document.
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any number of other tech woes
As things get more digital they're also getting more delicate in many respects. The smallest EMP devices set off in (for instance) an airport parking garage will kill everything with an unprotected chip within a kilometer (including pacemakers and insulin pumps). With a paper passport there is still the ability to be identified even if the chip is fried (along with all the equipment to read and process them). The digital dependent will be screwed.
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If this were true, then the $30 ‘passport card’ would be more useful.
Non sequitur.
False positives? (Score:5, Interesting)
So how will travelers prove they are not actually the wanted terrorist that the face id scans claim them to be without some other piece of internationally recognized id?
Automated facial recognition has it's place but until they are 100.00000% accurate I'll keep my paper passport thank you.
No to mention I like to look back at all the entry stamps/visas I've collected in my passports over the years from time to time.
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90% of the 9/11 terrorists were here legally.
It's estimated that Al Qu'e'da has a thousand sleeper agents in country through the Southern border now, waiting on a signal.
Passports didn't exist until 120 years ago. That's just two people ago in human history.
Just be aware that the system is for herd management, like cattle ear tags, not for other claimed purposes. They tell the cattle the ear tags are for their own good because cattle will believe anything.
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The US Government was talking about German sleeper agents in WWI.
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So how will travelers prove they are not actually the wanted terrorist that the face id scans claim them to be without some other piece of internationally recognized id?
Automated facial recognition has it's place but until they are 100.00000% accurate I'll keep my paper passport thank you.
No to mention I like to look back at all the entry stamps/visas I've collected in my passports over the years from time to time.
The biometric system used by a lot of nations actually works quite well with facial recognition (we'll it's using more than facial recognition). For people who get regular false positives there is already a redress system in place. I know a guy who has the same ethnicity, first and last name as someone the FBI is after (not a "top 10" but definitely a top 100), so he always has his redress letter ready for immigration control.
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That must be awful for him. All it takes is one idiot who don't like the look of the well worn letter...
This happens regularly in the UK, and the police pay out quite a lot of money for false arrests.
Also False Negatives (Score:2)
Last weekend I flew with my brother-in-law from Grand Rapids to Houston. The Grand Rapids airport uses biometric software to match a person's driver's license, to their face as captured live on camera. The software refused to confirm that he was the person in the driver's license photo. I'm not sure how they finally resolved the situation, but it held up the security line for some time, until they figured it out.
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Facial recognition still sucks, 50 years after it was introduced. The hand scan system that Amazon uses in its stores seems to be the most reliable currently. Barring catastrophic damage to both hands it will always work, and there isn't a way to forge it (currently). The back end could be attacked of course, but the tech itself seems sound.
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Huh?
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That's my stalker, just ignore his garbage.
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So how will travelers prove they are not actually the wanted terrorist that the face id scans claim them to be without some other piece of internationally recognized id?
That seems obvious.
The only way the face recognition tech can work at all is if the system has access to a database of ID data. So... if the face recognition doesn't work, you'll just get pulled aside into a redress process where they look you up manually... then check your face and possibly other identifying data against your person, exactly the same way the border control agent matches you against the face in your passport booklet.
A bigger concern is, what happens when there's a power outage or other
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I think this is just a 'trial balloon', the tech is not ready for prime time and I'm quite sure they know it. They can pretend to "delay" its introduction because of the public reaction and look good.
How unique and immutable is a face? (Score:2)
I seem to recall an issue in... South Korea? where they were becoming a popular destination for plastic surgery medical tourism, and they faced a problem where people would fly in, get facial surgery, and then have problems leaving because their face no longer looked like their passport. Doctors started giving their patients certificates explaining that they'd had facial surgery. The certificates carried no legal weight, but did help people explain things to officials.
I feel like facial recognition based pa
Other important uses (Score:2)
When I travel internationally for work, immigration checks are just one of the many times I have to get out my passport. Depending on the country:
Hotel check in
Train tickets
Airline tickets
Museum entrance
Security checkpoints
Credit card verification
Car rental
Dealing with police
ID at hospitals
ID at companies I visit
And so on
By law, I have to carry it with me at all times in some countries.
bad idea (Score:2)
Singapore and Finland are very unusual cultures (Score:2)
Despite very different circumstances and starting points, they share some things in common with each other that are quite atypical elsewhere, including very high levels of trust in authority (because government is pretty damn effective), a focus on robust solutions without too much time for cuddly things (eg efficiency valued more highly than user experience), and the notion of common benefit being really important (enough to outweigh individual benefits fairly often).
So you can see why these border control
Easier to fake a face than a passport (Score:2)
Phoenix, AZ (Score:2)
When we entered the US from Mexico this Spring. We walked up to passport control and were greeted by name and waved on through. We didn't even need to show our passports or any other information.
Facial recognition. Somewhat spooky.
False (Score:2)
Paper Passports may be getting used less at airports, that doesn't mean they are dying or even capable of dying. Checking in at Schiphol Airport using my face (something that has been possible with a Privium subscription for years now) does not mean I don't need a passport if I get pulled over in an African country, or land at virtually all other 1200 international airports on the planet.
The paper passport will not be phased out in the lifetime of anyone currently on Slashdot.
Just like personal signatures, right? (Score:2)
Hasn't happened fast enough, and I'm sure issues will crop up in the decades until it actually happens for real.