NO2ID

Email from Newport Passport Office yeserday:

"With regards to the matter of renewing your passport before the introduction of biometric chip. I must inform you that this is now only possible if you apply for the Premium same day service. You must make an appointment to attend a passport office by calling us on 0870 521 0410. The waiting time for your passport will be four hours once the application has been accepted and a receipt supplied by the cashier. The Premium fee amounts to £96.50 (which includes £51 standard passport fee). It is anticipated that the Newport Passport office will produce biometric passports from the beginning of June 2006.I have posted a passport application pack to you today and recommend that you arrange an appointment as soon as possible."

For clarification:

The Passport Service produces the bulk of passports at its main production area in Manchester, a proportion of these passports are already biometric and it is impossible to be certain of obtaining a non-biometric one other than by applying for the four-hour Premium service, where the passport is produced at the local centre, Newport in my case. From June, at Newport, the Premium service passports will contain the biometric chip. All passports will contain the chip by August according to the UKPS' website. Contact your local passport office to find out if you can still obtain a chipless passport there.

Please remember that at first - up to 2008/9 or whenever the NIR is up and running - biometric passports will only contain the minimum data required by ICAO regulations. This is simply an electonic data version of the passport photo itself, which is nothing much to worry about.

I agree. Though space will be reserved on the chip for the additional biometrics, plus there are the RFID issues.

It seems to me that all these things are being implimented with indecent haste. Why?

On what basis do you say that there is nothing much to worry about?Anyone carrying a biometric passport with a RFID, proximity or contactless chip, whatever the goverment wants to call it, are carrying a device capable of giving off radio frequencies at an unknown distance. The fact that the information on it is encrypted and information printed in the passort is required to read the chip, doesn't mean that access to the information on the chip won't become available to others in the future. Do you trust this government, after all the lies and deceit of the last 9 years? Not to mention the possibility of another Thatcher coming along, or even worse, a Hitler or a Stalin. Also there is the fact that government agencies have an appalling record of dismal failure where computer projects are concerned. Who is to say who will be give access to the means of reading the chip and the info it contains. The government is likely to farm out the contracts to private companies.Also remember that the information on the data page of the existing passports are stored somewhere, and anyone who can gain access to that digital information, through hacking, corruption or whatever, will be able to interrogate the biometric passport, and thus reveal your identity as a UK citizen, and increase the possibility of your being targeted by terrorists or criminals.

There is no room for complacency with this technology.

Does anyone have any means of identifying if the passport contains an RFID chip using 'non-destructive testing' i.e. not by microwaving it? It’s not even clear if any have been issued yet.

If you look at the UKPS website, it states there that the biometric passports will have a statement printed on the exterior saying that they contain a chip

Quote from the email I got from the UKPS last week:

Thank you for your enquiry.

The Identity and Passport Service issued the first biometric passport in March 2006. The biometric data contained in the new passport is a facial image. Facial biometrics involves measuring the distance between key points on the face. These measurements are obtained from the photograph submitted with the passport application. The passport photograph is digitally encoded and stored securely on a chip in the book. The chip will also store the personal details of the passport holder, as contained on page 31 of the passport.

Information on the UK biometric passport will be protected using an international standard called Basic Access Control. This requires that the Machine Readable Zone (MRZ), found at the bottom of Page 31 of the passport, to be optically scanned by the reader and that a code/key is generated from the Machine Readable Zone information which is used by the reader to firstly 'unlock' the contactless chip and then as a key to encrypt subsequent communication between the chip and the reader.


Making access to the chip dependent on first reading the Machine Readable Zone makes it impossible to read the chip remotely or without the document holder's consent, irrespective of the power or distance of the reader; thus protecting the passport holder against skimming and eavesdropping.

The Identity and Passport Service has started to produce small volumes of the new biometric passport. During the early stages of transition from digital to biometric, some people will receive a new biometric passport, but most customers will receive an existing digital passport. We will not be able to meet individual requests for either digital or biometric passports.

We will switch over completely to biometric passports once we are confident it is safe to do so. Both types of passport are valid travel documents."

I shall be getting my non-biometric passport from the passport office on Tuesday 11 April, using the four hour Premium service

Some useful information there, however accurate it is. Thanks brynt.

Sorry for being a bit thick, but what's the difference between having the facial biometric stored on a chip, and just having a digital photo? I assume that they're not going to scan your face every time you whip out your passport, so that they can compare it?

I suspect the photos, even though 'digitised' and stored on computers will not be of a good enough quality to get the biometrics from. I think they need a special high-resolution camaera for this. Just think about how many faces they need to distinguish your ID from by measurements between the nose, eyes, mouth etc. A passport photo is small and not generally very good quality and a bit blurred.

However CCD is getting rapidly better and measured by the number of pixels. Just look at how this number has increased with digital cameras available to consumers. The professional ones are likely to be much better than this so within a few years all CCTV will be networked and fitted with facial recognition software. The extra cost and work required is trivial once a network of CCTV is installed.

Also here is a bit of inside information regarding this. The company Energis has installed a 1.5 terabit network across the country with major links between the large cities. The equipment is housed in bombproof rooms in an old DSS building and this was at a time when Energis was not making much money and had no need to use this massive network.

I've renewed my non-biometric passport.... its valid until 2017, so it says, unless Charles Clarke, Adolf Hitler II, Joseph Stalin Mk 2, Chairman Mao Jnr, comes along and decides that my identity is required of me, and if I refuse to comply end up in a concentration camp for political dissidents.

With travel costs it came to over £100 to get this non-RFID passport.

I will NEVER, EVER vote Labour again. This party has betrayed the ordinary working people of this country

I have a little experience of this, working in the field of video processing. The latest CCD chips have a resolution of over 5 megapixels. That's more than enough to be able to distingiush the main features of a person's face. For comparison, a high definition (next generation) DVD has a resolution of around 4.2 megapixels. A current generation camcorder has a resolution of around 1/2 a megapixel.