The Identity & Passport Service has lost 3,000 blank passports and visas after thieves robbed a security van while the driver was in the newsagents.

The IPS said that the passports can’t be used because of the security chip but this is utter bollocks.  They can be used at home and abroad as ID and could be used to travel abroad through ports that don’t use the chipped passports.  They can also be read by commercially available, perfectly legal RFID scanners and cracked with open-source, perfectly legal software.  The personal details and photo on a passport are stored in the chip and can be read without even taking it out of its envelope.  I don’t believe that every port on the planet is going to be connected up to our passport database so I assume that the data read off the chip will be displayed on a screen to be compared with what’s on the passport and if the data can be read off the RFID chip, it can also be written to the RFID chip … a new photo for instance, or a new set of biometric data.  

Despite IPS’ assertion that the passports are worthless, they have valued them at £2.5m on the black market.

And this is the British government department that wants us to trust our biometric data to them for use in ID cards.

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