The future goal for U.S. passports is, according to the State Department, to have radio frequency identification (RFID) chips embedded in them. RFID chips are tiny microchips (also called "tags") that have information stored on them. They can be "read" by an RFID reader, which sends a radio signal to the chip, causing the chip to activate and return its information to the RFID reader (the cool thing is that the chip is actually powered by the radio wave that hits it). What's on this chip? "[E]verything on the passport's information page: name, date and place of birth, and digitized photo."

Privacy advocate Ed Felten wanted to know why such a technology would be necessary at all. First of all, this technology is covert in that you don't know that your passport is being scanned. Why is this necessary in a free society? Why would the government want to be able to scan your passport without your knowledge? Second, it would allow the U.S. government to track its citizens in foreign countries. Third, it would allow criminals to identify Americans based on the number their passport returns. No matter how much you can blend in with the culture, your passport will give you away, and criminals love rich American targets. Fourth, privacy advocates were up in arms when the State Department said it would not include security measures, such as foil-lined covers, in passports to prevent them from being read unwantedly. Aluminum foil would block the radio transmission, meaning a person would actually have to open his passport if he wanted it to be read by someone. This means it could not be read by snoopy agents or criminals, only when the passport's owner wanted it to be read. The government didn't like this idea for some reason.

Anyway, Ed Felten asked some questions of a State Department representative at the recent Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy. One of these questions was, why not smart cards? Smart cards are "contact-readable," meaning they can't be read from afar; the person reading the card has to come into physical contact with the person holding the smart card in order to read it. Is this a conspiracy? Is the FBI trying to track Americans covertly? The answer is not nearly that sexy, says Felten:

It seems that the decision to use contactless technology was made without fully understanding its consequences, relying on technical assurances from people who had products to sell. Now that the problems with that decision have become obvious, it's late in the process and would be expensive and embarrassing to back out. In short, this looks like another flawed technology procurement program.