Passports under scrutiny

Interpol Secretary-General Ronald Noble, speaking in New York last week, stated that there are a staggering 10 to 15 million stolen passports in use around the world. Not exactly a comforting thought as we continue to wage war against the threat of global terrorism.

“If member countries treated stolen passports like citizens treat their stolen credit cards, we would have many fewer terrorists and organised criminals in the world,” Noble says.

According to Noble,only 87 countries are participating in an Interpol computer database on stolen passports and 100 others have yet to make a decision.

“Unless all countries share the information globally, the terrorists and organised criminals will be able to move from country to country,” Noble says.

“In the first World Trade Centre bombing in 1993, the person who did it, Ramzi Youssef, was in possession of a stolen Iraqi passport.

“The Prime Minister of Serbia, Zoran Djindjic, was assassinated in 2003 by someone carrying a stolen Croatian passport that had been stamped 26 times by six European countries and by Singapore,” he says.

In October the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), issued the first biometrically enabled Australian passport – or ePassport. In Australia some 32,000 passports a year are reported lost or stolen.

The new passports, which feature a microchip embedded in the centre that contains information about the bearer, along with their image , can be verified when passed before a technical reading machine known as an optical identifier.

This will in turn be complimented by SmartGate,a facial recognition system, matching a passport holder’s stored image against the individual presenting the documentation at the Australian border. The Australian Customs Service and DFAT claim that SmartGate performs matching and other border clearance processes in under 10 seconds, with an error rate of 1-2%.

In the US, The State Department plans to produce more than 1 million e-passports by the end of 2005 and, by 2006, it expects all new passports to feature the special microchips, according to Angela Aggeler, a spokeswoman for the agency’s Bureau of Consular Affairs.

“A U.S. passport is one of the most valuable documents in the world,” Aggeler said. “The harder we make it for someone to fake a passport or travel as an imposter on a U.S. passport, the better off and safer we all are.”

However, the era when e-passports are widespread is still some years away. Passports are valid for 10 years, so it will take a long time for a majority of the population to replace the ordinary passports they have today.

The Mole