E-Passports Help Reduce Passport Fraud…Or Do They?
How effective are E-passports?
By Joshlin Sheridan, Marketing —
New Technology?
Because of the high number of visitors and visa-waiters that the United States gets each year, it’s important that those entering the country have valid passports. In 2007, E-passports were issued to citizens of the 38 countries listed on the US visa waiver seeking admission into The States. How does this technology work? As opposed to purely paper passports, E-passports contain an electronic chip that secures information about the passport holder. This technology ensures the authenticity of the passenger and makes it extremely difficult to forge travel paperwork or to steal another’s identity.
A Flaw in the System
This technology sounds ideal, right? As refined as the chip itself is, recent information has revealed that the chip readers are not as up to par as previously presented. A recent letter from a US senator to US Customs and Border Protection revealed that much of the border staff does not have the proper scanners to verify the chips in the E-passports. This means that although the chips have been used for over a decade, the passport readers have often lacked the software to validate the passports. Apparently, Customs and Border Protection has been aware of this issue since 2010 but has yet to update the technology to know if the information on the E-passport chip is authentic.
How to Improve Passport Applications
Clearly, there is still work to be done in order to improve the E-passport technology. However, other passport reform methods can also be implemented to improve the passport application process. IdentityDetect™, an identity verification service, is the solution that could help verify the identities of people who are applying for passports. This technology can be web-based or used through a mobile app. It verifies customers identities within about 2 minutes through a nonintrusive test that monitors variations in motor nervous system responses.
IdentityDetect could be a great solution to reduce passport fraud that could work in tandem with E-passports or be implemented as the government is in the process of improving chip-reader technology.
Source
Photo by / Sidney Pearce
