The San Francisco Chronicle today writes about a German company called Infineon that received a U.S. government contract to put RFID chips in US passports.

The RFID chip embedded in the back cover of the passport will, according to the State Department, "securely store the same data visually displayed on the photo page of the passport, and will additionally include a digital photograph." Additionally, "[t]he inclusion of the digital photograph will enable biometric comparison, through the use of facial recognition technology at international borders." This is why applicants are being asked not to smile in passport photographs: smiling confuses facial recognition software.

Contrary to what we've heard before, the Chronicle reports, the State Department will be using foil-lined covers to prevent unauthorized remote reading of the RFID chips. At least they're doing that.

But does this make us safer? "In a post-9/11 world," the institution of any security measures must cause us to ask, "Does this make us safer than we were before these new security measures?" Vis-a-vis RFID passports, the State Department seems to think so. "The idea is to make sure the person who is carrying the passport is the person to whom the passport was issued,'' State Department spokeswoman Janelle Hironimus told the Chronicle.

But is that really a problem? The attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 caused the State Department to re-think passports. Consider the following: all of the Sept. 11 hijackers had valid passports, issued to them by their government. They also had valid U.S. visas, issued legitimately by the U.S. government to them. Fake IDs were not the problem. Had we instituted an RFID passport system prior to Sept. 11, the attacks still would have happened, since the security failure was not the legitimacy of the hijackers' IDs.

Are we safer now that we have RFID passports? Definitely not. RFID passports are a boon for two groups of people: (1) people who want government contracts and (2) people who enjoy surveillance. For the first group, the motive is money. Infineon is certainly going to be paid a lot of money to manufacture RFID chips for passports. For the second group, the motive is access control. Imagine: the U.S. government takes photographs of a peaceful anti-Israel demonstration in London. The government picks up some faces and puts them into a database. When Johnny Protester from England tries to come into the United States, the digital copy of his face is compared with the database of undesirables, some of them legitimately terrorists, others just rabblerousers, others guilty of espousing opinions the government doesn't like. And guess what? Johnny Protester, demonstrating against something that the U.S. government is in favor of, isn't allowed entry into the country. He is never told why; indeed, he isn't allowed to know why. All he knows is that he is on a blacklist that he didn't know about, with no way of getting off the list, and is denied entry into the country.

It could even be that a picture of Johnny Protester at the rally was sent anonymously to the State Department by someone that doesn't like Johnny Protester, perhaps someone who espouses the opposite opinion as him. The State Department receives the picture, puts it in the database, and Johnny Protester is blacklisted from the United States by his enemies. (If you think this scenario is one of those crazy make-'em-ups, read this and skip to page 4.)

Hmmm. You know what? RFID passports are bad for security, but they're great for spying on people!