Two Fired in Passport Case
Last week, the national news was obsessed with the story about two State Department contractors that apparently snooped through Presidential candidate Barack Obama's passport records. To me, that is where the efforts of the privacy advocates and others critical of RFID should be focusing their efforts about passport data security. Which seems a more likely scenario for how passport data is stolen: Working with a $9/hour contractor at Stanley to snoop through passport records? Or, developing a high-intensity RFID-reader, standing next to people - undetected -as they walk across the border or through an airport, and electronically scanning their information from an RFID chip embedded in the passport?
I'm not trying to say that there aren't legitimate issues associated with the unprotected use of RFID in certain sensitive applications - there are. However, this story demonstrates that there are much bigger risks in passport data security than the disproportionate fear pointed at RFID.
