A passport to track you

New Delhi: Your passport will soon carry not just your photograph but also your fingerprints. It will be tamper-proof and will allow authorities to track your movements, sources said.
The pilot launch of the e-passports will take place next month, with diplomats and government officials being issued the first batch. Ordinary citizens will get them from the middle of next year, foreign ministry sources said.
These passports will have thinner front and back pages. The back page will have a 64-kilobyte silicon chip and an embedded rectangular antenna. The chip will store the holder’s photograph and bio-metric information such as fingerprints, as well as details of the last 20 to 30 trips the holder has undertaken, including any movements near international borders.
The National Informatics Centre and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, were entrusted with the project, which has passed lab tests.
Those involved in the project say the e-passports will help prevent misuse. “Since the information is stored in a chip, it is impossible to tamper with,” Rajat Moona of IIT Kanpur’s computer science department told The Telegraph. He said India would be the 46th country in the world to issue the e-passport, and added that the software was “completely homegrown”.
19/05/08 Jayanth Jacob/The Telegraph

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Categories: Airports May 2008