But what kind of cryptography makes it mathematically impossible for bribed officials to issue perfecly legal and cryptographically protected fake passports, and if none, then what problem do electronic passports actually solve other than creating even more opportunities to surveil common people?
Here is a list of trivially obvious ways that they solve problems:
1. They can be read significantly faster, or even automatically, which cuts down on long border control lines even when the biometrics are not used.
2. They are significantly harder to forge without the consent of the issuer, even for other nation-states.
3. They can store biometrics that allow the bearer's identity to be verified automatically and with a very high degree of confidence.
I am all for being skeptical of the government's actions, but passports are a ridiculous place to have such a strong kneejerk reaction. You're already on a list and your movements are being tracked. ePassport features are only more convenient when compared to older passports.
Living in a country whose government started a genocidal war in a neighbour one and conscripted hundreds of thousands to become food for vultures in the fields, I have all reasons for strong and quite conscious, as opposed to "kneejerk", reactions against its initiatives.
Thinking that anyone in the world is safe from such atrocities where they live is bit shortsighted, to put it mildly, and the writing is already on the wall if you watch the state of the world affairs. Just imagine trying to avoid being dragged into a meatgrinder started by psychopaths when one's every move requires your ID. Yes, every, because being significantly faster makes for pervasively frequent instead of convenient.
I also envision that this checkpoint frequency will eventually reach the level when people are required to emit constant _streams_ of authentication tokens, which will of course imply it must be done remotely and without any manual consent. That's a perfect use case for the proverbial implanted RFID chips or continuous and ubiquitous biometric scanning, and rejecting that is the absolute hill to die on for people who have any remaining human dignity and love for freedom.
> Yes, every, because being significantly faster makes for pervasively frequent instead of convenient.
You are already subjected to a paperwork cavity search to get a passport, let alone use it.
> I also envision that this checkpoint frequency will eventually reach the level when people are required to emit constant _streams_ of authentication tokens, which will of course imply it must be done remotely and without any manual consent.
An ePassport does not increase the frequency at which it's scanned. It's still only used in the classic situations: ports, hotels, other expensive tourist stuff where they want an ID on file.
> That's a perfect use case for the proverbial implanted RFID chips or continuous and ubiquitous biometric scanning, and rejecting that is the absolute hill to die on for people who have any remaining human dignity and love for freedom.
Using an RFID chip in an identity document is not a slippery slope to implanted tracking chips and it is ridiculous to suggest that it is.
For one thing, with printed passports border officials have to recognise all the anti-fraud features on all the passports issued worldwide in the past 10 years.
Quick, what security image on a valid UK passport - a thistle, a daffodil, a rose, a clover, a coat of arms (but not the same coat of arms as on the front cover), a map of the UK, a harlequin pattern, a crown, a lighthouse, a pair of bird wings, William Shakespeare, an oak leaf, a compass, a marine chronometer, the letters UK, the words United Kingdom, a Bermuda-rigged boat, a square-rigged boat, a steamship, or the holder's birth date?
It's a trick question, you'll find all of them; they changed the passport once for brexit, and again after the queen's death. And that's just one document from one country. Far simpler to just hold it to the reader and get a beep.
For another thing, if you're worried about bribed officials - it's much harder to bribe airport border officials if they're required to scan every passport into a computer, and match it against the airline's passenger list.
That is true. However, the border guard should also be trained to recognize the passport physically without the electronic tracking. Putting your national security eggs in one digital basket just seems like a disaster waiting to happen.
Usually some state's passports grant the holder more privileges than those issued by another state precisley because of the perceived risk of them being (not) obtained by fraud. Your genuine Sealand passport is less practically useful than a genuine Finnish one for use in the context of international travel.
The cryptography aspect is basically preventing the corrupt Sealand government official from stamping out ones that might be confused for, for example, a Finnish one.
Sealand[1] being used as an example least likely to cause offense - but you can understand that most governments around the world really do want to ensure that they are the only ones issuing their passports, and hence what that means for their citizens.
1. It's easier to centralize cryptographic cert issuance than passport issuance.
You may allow embassy personnel to issue passports, while still requiring a computer system in the homeland to verify that the person actually exists in some government register (and that photos match) before the certificate can be issued.
If you give embassy personnel blank passport templates, they can issue passports with completely fake identification details, for people who have never existed. The moment computers get into the mix, that may no longer be possible, or at least leave an audit trail.
2. There's no risk of surveillance. Reading data from the chip still requires you to read the MRZ, so you can't do that remotely.
There's nothing a chip gives you that you wouldn't get from a normal passport (beyond a very easy and hard-to-fake way to verify that the passport is authentic).
The history of passports has always been surveillance and control of movement of, and enforcing quotas on, the proles.
In their earliest form, they were documents from your lord that permitted you to travel, and specified where you belonged and where you were allowed to travel to, most often used for internal travel. Later and in general, they were used to keep the poor from moving, for example, to find work elsewhere.
Later Americans used them to limit European immigration based on country of origin, Europeans used them in WWII to do some not good things, Soviets used them to exile or keep undesirables where they wanted them, etc
Referring to prior steps of incremental loss of freedoms as excuse for the upcoming is like stabbing oneself with a barbed harpoon one notch deeper under the excuse of it being already quite deep into one's flesh.
What's your point? Passports are essential in todays globalist world. I read once that British people travelling through revolutionary france were incredulous and derisive of their insistence that everyone should have a passport. I do believe that the British historically had a much stronger sense of personal liberty as opposed to Europe and you can see remenants of that to this day and that they passed on this culture to the US who are the strongest believers in it.
The British historically had an extensive travel document system that kept the poor bound to their parishes, feudal relations -> capitalist relations came with changes to internal travel and criminalization of unemployment/poverty to address the want for a mobile, landless and dispensible workforce divorced from feudal obligations.
I don't think freedom had much to do with either their passport system or changes to internal travel policy, they were used to enforce relations even through the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
There was certainly rhetoric about liberty regarding passport reform among thinkers and the mercantile class later in London, Adam Smith talks about it in The Wealth of Nations, but I would not say there is a history of a liberatory British passport system.
The insinuation that passports are bound up in oppression and hierarchy is silly. Maybe historically they had that element but that has long fallen away. At most the modern system is built on the dead remains of an older system but has no connection to it. The current digital id being proposed otoh is definitely designed to erode freedom...
Faster processing leads to more processing and ID checks for everything. When no one notices total surveillance because it is quietly automatic, God forbid nerds make a drama about it right? America needs more Flock cameras!
I don’t disagree with you, but it’s irrelevant to the topic of electronic passport credentials.
Flock doesn’t need ID, and the pervasive surveillance is being done at the backend. The federal regime is linking everything together with Palantir to build the “Total Information Awareness” capability that the Bush administration wanted 20 years ago. You now need to validate your identity via mobile or present a RealID to forward mail.
By linking these high trust events to your metadata, all sorts of nasty stuff will emerge.
> it’s irrelevant to the topic of electronic passport credentials
Maybe for some people when they say passport they mean ID.
> the pervasive surveillance is being done at the backend
You need to get data for it to work. Like with LLMs no data = it doesn't work.
OCR on numberplate is getting data. If it was a human identifying these plates there would not be any controversy because it would not scale for total surveillance. But flock means it's done constantly and without most people even knowing and if they knew they would protest.
Checking ID is also getting data. Ability to check ID quickly and automatically means checking ID can be done more and in ways people don't even notice.
That's an overly cynical take. Obviously it means that a criminal organization would need to recruit officials before they could issue fake passports. Which is already pretty hard.
And maybe they would need to recruit multiple officials across multiple agencies. And if these agencies has internal policing, then even if they manage to do that, they now have another vulnerability where the criminal operation can be discovered and sabotaged.
