Some related posts from Technorati and Google.

  GromBlog : My Mom never saw the irony in calling me a "Son-of-a-Bitch".: A friend recently renewed his UK passport and was dismayed to find that it was replaced with an RFID passport featuring a facial biometrics chip. He's also even more dismayed to send me this article about how they've already been cracked and cloned. (via Cosmos)

RunningWithBulls.com - The curse of Sanfermin: (Simple but it works) Now that RFID passports have been cloned, this scares the bejaysus out of me even more. As the hacker at the blackhat conference showed through a proof of concept, nasty people could use RFID readers to profile a passport of a certain nation, and use it to detonate an explosive device. (via Cosmos)

  Mike The Actuary’s Musings: The passports now have some anti-skimming features, including Basic Access Control and some sort of internal tin-foil hat. But the chips are readily clonable, and some security experts still aren’t sure they are a good idea. (via Cosmos)

  media monarchy: from voice of america: The terrorist plot to blow up aircraft flying between Britain and the United States is having repercussions in many airports around the world. Investigators have indicated the plot centered on a plan to use liquid explosives, and many airports are now prohibiting passengers from carrying any liquids on board with them. (via Cosmos)

The Ideal Government Project: Hi-tech biometric passports used by Britain and other countries have been hacked by a computer expert, throwing into doubt fundamental parts of the UK's £415m scheme to load passports with information such as fingerprints, facial scans and iris patterns. Apparently it only took Lukas Grunwald, a consultant with a German security company, less than a fortnight and equipment costing just £105 to discover a method for cloning the information stored in the new passports, transfering data onto blank chips which could then be implanted in fake passports. (via Cosmos)

  BillDay.com: Wired News has posted an article on the growing number of colleges replacing student landlines with mobile phones. (via Cosmos)

  Chaos-In-Motion: RFID Passport Chips Hacked (via Cosmos)

 [Bruce Boyes's Blog] RFID in passports: bad idea: Without any protection, the passports might be "skimmed" - read at a distance by strangers as people walked through any public place. The weakness could allow a government to track someone, or allow a criminal to steal the names, digital photos and passport numbers of people on the street...

[Schneier.com] Schneier on Security: RFID Zapper: I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised if a disabled RFID tag would be considered altering the passport and already be a crime, or if someone would see comments like those here and push for a law to make it illegal. There don't have to be any actual instances of people intentionally killing their RFID tag to create a law that presumes guilt in the case of a nonfunctional tag and puts the burden on the passport holder to prove that they did not intentionally disable it.

 [Travelsecurity.blogspot.com] Travel Security: Gemalto announced they have been selected to provide chips for U.S. passports with the first order from the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO). These will go into passports starting in 2007.

 [Netscape.com] Stories Tagged 'rfid' » Netscape.com: Worried about someone skimming or eavesdropping on the signal from your RFID-enabled passport? Want some additional protection, over…

 [News.com.com] Researchers: E-passports pose security risk | CNET News.com: At a pair of security conferences here, researchers demonstrated that passports equipped with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags can be cloned with a laptop equipped with a $200 RFID reader and a similarly inexpensive smart card writer. In addition, they suggested that RFID tags embedded in travel documents could identify U.S. passports from a distance, possibly letting terrorists use them as a trigger for explosives.

Reflected tags on Technorati: Blog, Protection, Global Security Watch