Rachael Woodhouse
GCN Live.com
“Don’t take the chip!” This advice – trumpeted by the vigilant across the airwaves and cyberspace – is proving to be harder and harder to follow, as RFID (radio-frequency identification) continues permeate more and more aspects of public life. The latest utilization of this controversial technology has to do with the new U.S. passports being issued with embedded RFID.
RFID technology is already being used on toll roads, season parking tickets, and other forms of automatic payment. For example, in Norway, all public toll roads are equipped with an RFID payment system known as AutoPASS.
Renowned consumer travel advocate Edward Hasbrouck recently spoke with GCN’s Dr. Katherine Albrecht about the growing public outcry regarding RFID.
In addition to privacy concerns, rising costs associated with the technology are coming under fire from civil liberties groups such as the ACLU. Albrecht points out that a 23% price hike – From $110 to $135 – for new passports went into effect on Tuesday, July 13th.
But Hasbrouck says that’s not all. “What I think is likely to be of most concern … is that the price of having pages added to your passport, if you’ve been using it for a number of years and it fills up, and you don’t want to just get a new one — you’d like to keep that old one without a chip in it — and at least get up to its full 10-year validity before you have to get a chipped and traceable passport — the fee to add pages to your passport is going from zero – free – to 82 dollars.”
“What’s happened is that having the RFID chips has proved, not surprisingly, not only to be more complicated but more expensive than the State Department had anticipated, and so they’re trying to make us bear that cost,” Hasbrouck says.
Edward Hasbrouck is a freelance travel journalist, consumer advocate for travelers, author of the "Practical Nomad" series of travel how-to and advice books, and consultant to the Identity Project on travel-related privacy, civil liberties, and human rights issues.
According to Wikipedia, “There are a variety of groups defining standards and regulating the use of RFID, including: International Organization for Standardization (ISO), International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), ASTM International, DASH7 Alliance, EPCglobal. (Refer to Regulation and standardization below.)”
Hasbrouck says public opposition to RFID is strong and growing, with the prevailing sentiment unlikely to change anytime soon. “What’s interesting I think is that … 98% of the comments from the public opposed this scheme. They didn’t just get comments from the public, but they did also hear from the travel industry itself, some airlines, industry associations, who realized that raising the price of a passport would raise the bar for Americans going abroad. They heard from a number of consumer and civil liberties groups.”
But Hasbrouck says these concerns fell on deaf ears with government bureaucrats. “What happened is that the State Department basically just brushed off all the criticisms and said ‘we’re going to put these fee increases ahead regardless.”
U.S. Passports Issued per Fiscal Year (2009 - 1996) (source: <strong><a href="http://travel.state.gov">U.S. State Department</a></strong>)
In related travel woes, the ACLU has now filed a complaint against the federal government’s no-fly list, which has prevented several Americans abroad from returning home. “This is a group of Americans who have been trapped overseas and can’t come home because the U.S. government will not give any airline permission to fly them home. So they’ve literally been exiled from their own country for no reason that the government will tell them.”
So the question remains: In our post-911 world, is travel privacy and freedom headed for the dustbin of history?
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….And here is the official government perspective on RFID passports: