30 December, 2004
category: Biometrics, Financial, Government, RFID
“At the moment Europe’s plans for ID consists of two biometric identifiers, facial and fingerprint, for passport and for visas and residence permits for third country nationals. The passport plans theoretically stem from ICAO’s standard for biometric passports (which only requires facial) and from US requirements for biometric passports for visitors (again, facial acceptable) from late next year. The European Commission has however been busily devising a far more wide-ranging system of biometric ID with the enthusiastic support of the Council of Ministers. The elected European Parliament has been somewhat less keen, but is generally ignored. Next on the agenda are plans for a common format for ID cards.
Conceivably you could produce a compatible system for RFID-readable biometric passports, residence permits and ID, because European control of the standards here makes it at least theoretically possible to avoid collisions between chips. The ID cards/permits would only have one chip on them (provided the permit was a separate card and not in the passport), and the passport system’s operation would only become doubtful if other countries started putting RFID biometric visas in them. But, um, seeing that’s precisely what Europe intends to do to third country passports, it would seem obvious that other countries would want to start doing it too. This is where you really start to run into problems. The report considers the possibility of several such visas in the same passport, and concludes that the proposed regulation is “technically not feasible”