There’s a good article from the AP detailing the basic info on RFID chips and the controversy how the government is mandating the use of them in passports and slowly pushing them into most other forms of government ID as well.
If you’ve read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother then you already know what a problem this is. If you haven’t (and I highly recommend you do, you can get it for free), this piece from the article should convince you:
Climbing into his Volvo, outfitted with a Matrics antenna and a Motorola reader he’d bought on eBay for $190, Chris Paget cruised the streets of San Francisco with this objective: To read the identity cards of strangers, wirelessly, without ever leaving his car.
It took him 20 minutes to strike hacker’s gold.
Zipping past Fisherman’s Wharf, his scanner detected, then downloaded to his laptop, the unique serial numbers of two pedestrians’ electronic U.S. passport cards embedded with radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags. Within an hour, he’d “skimmed” the identifiers of four more of the new, microchipped PASS cards from a distance of 20 feet.
If it’s that easy for one guy whose not trying terribly hard to get this kind of data, what do you think a dedicated hacker or identity thief could do? And equally disturbing, consider how easy this will eventually make it for the government to track your every movement? That’s right, I’m looking at you Winston – down with Big Brother indeed.
Now, there are some steps you can take. It’s illegal to tamper with a government passport or ID, which includes deliberately disabling the RFID chip, so I’m not telling you to do anything, but accidents do happen.
Likewise, I’m not supporting or endorsing the contents of these links, but they do make for an interesting read:
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