Completely ignoring the objections of just about everyone, the U.S. State Department has decided to add RFID chips containing your personal information and photograph to U.S. passports.

The new passports will be issued to government employees in a test program beginning in December, and to the public starting in October 2006.

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a United Nations agency, has developed international specifications for electronic passports meant to keep information such as name, nationality, sex, date of birth, place of birth and digitized photograph of the passport holder secure. United Kingdom and Germany also have announced similar plans.

The passports will have 64 kilobyte RFID chip to permit adequate storage room in case additional data, or fingerprints or iris scan biometric technology is added in the future. The United States will follow ICAO’s international specifications to participate in a global electronic passport initiative. The specification indicates a data format and use of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that permits digital signatures to protect the data from tampering, according to the Bush administration.

Consumer opposition for implanting RFID chips in passports has grown during the past year as fear that identity thieves could steal personal information embedded in the chip within the passport. The State Department this year received 2,335 comments on the project, and 98.5 percent were negative, mostly focusing on security and privacy concerns, and concerns about being identified by terrorists as a U.S. citizen.

Some comments called for the inclusion of an anti-skimming device that would block unauthorized connections with the readable chip to gain access to the data. “The doomsday scenario has been the ability for terrorist to drive by several cafés to find and target the most Americans in one place,” said Ray Everett-Church, attorney and principal consultant at PrivacyClue LLC. “I’m not sure how realistic that is, but when you work with these types of technologies you need to play out some of the possibilities to calm peoples’ fears.” — Information Week

And what good does that do if the passport is opened?

To address concerns about ID theft, the Bush administration said the new passports will be outfitted with “anti-skimming material” in the front cover to mitigate the threat of the information being surreptitiously scanned from afar. It’s not clear, though, how well the technique will work against high-powered readers that have been demonstrated to read RFID chips from 160 feet away.

“The shielding in the passport is a physical device that basically, when the passport cover is closed, it’s very difficult to read the chip,” a State Department official who insisted on anonymity said Tuesday.

Privacy advocates said the anti-skimming device was a decent start. But if the cover of the passport is open, all bets are off, said Bill Scannell, founder of the Web site RFIDkills.com. “They’ve built little baby radio stations into peoples’ passports and covered it with concrete,” he said. “But when the little hatch is open, you can still hear the music.” — News.com

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is considering challenging the regulations in court, based on their exceeding lawful authority. “Our point is, whatever Congress may have meant in giving the State Department authority to issue passports was probably to issue passports that were like the old passports. But at some point you are doing something that is significantly different, which should probably require some sort of additional congressional authorization. The argument is how broadly does that authority go, and honestly, it’s something no one knows,” said Lee Tien, EFF staff attorney.

But security expert Bruce Schneier has said he’s satisfied with the security measures. “Assuming that the RFID passport works as advertised (a big “if,” I grant you), then I am no longer opposed to the idea. And, more importantly, we have an example of an RFID identification system with good privacy safeguards,” he said when reviewing the system in August.

If the information really is encrypted, with the key on a barcode on the passport itself, as State had proposed a few months ago, then the security should be good enough to allay these privacy concerns.