Visiting America Could Require Passport Detour

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday December 20, 2004

Cynthia Banham

Australia is on the brink of a new era of international travel, with a decision expected by May on whether the Government will adopt biometric passports at an estimated cost of $160 million.

If the Government does not go ahead with the technology, Australians wishing to travel to the US would face the inconvenience of first having to attend a US consular office, where they would be fingerprinted and photographed.

This would require travellers from, say, South Australia to visit the Melbourne consulate in person before leaving on their holiday, or someone in Bourke, in far western NSW, to visit the Sydney consulate.

From next October the US is demanding that citizens of countries that do not introduce biometric passports - which hold a microchip filled with personal data ranging from a person's facial measurements to their place and date of birth - will have to go through a stringent visa process. More than 400,000 Australians travel to the US each year.

Belgium, Denmark, New Zealand, Britain, the Netherlands and Germany are well on their way to adopting the technology.

Facial recognition technology was adopted by the International Civil Aviation Organisation as the international standard for biometric passports, after rejecting other options including iris scans and fingerprints.

Whether Australia adopts the passports depends on a trial being run over three months from late February.

Under the trial, 1500 Qantas staff will be given biometric passports to use on trips to the US to see if these are compatible with the US technology.

Bob Nash, the assistant secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade passports branch, says Australia has led the way in the research and development of the passports. He expects the trial to work, and the new passports to be introduced from the middle of next year.

However, the technology is beset by many unknowns and potential difficulties. One is the prospect that fraudsters will develop a way of obtaining data from a biometric passport. This might be done by waving a device across a coat pocket where the passport is being held, allowing the absorption of data from the microchip.

Another issue is what to do about children and teenagers, whose faces change so rapidly that the data held on the microchip will become out of date before the 10-year passport expiry period.

The passport would not work if this was the case.

There is also the question of the durability of the passports - for example, whether they can survive being drenched in beer or left in the back pocket of a tourist who passes out in the sun on a beach.

Ordinary passports cost $150 for an adult. Biometric passports are expected to cost $20 more to produce. It is yet to be determined who will pay for this.

HOW THEY WILL WORK

* Microchip with biometric data is implanted in the passport.

* At Customs desk, passengers place passports on a reader.

* Data is read without the passport having to be opened, and a scanner checks that it matches the passenger.

* Error rate worldwide for checks of ordinary passports 40 per cent

* Claimed error rate for biometric passports 2 per cent