Comments on USA rules for RFID passports

Yesterday was the deadline for comments on the USA Department of State’s proposed rules for RFID passports:

• American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU): Comments and background documents
  
  
• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), PrivacyActivism, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, World Privacy Forum, and Bill Scannell: Comments (including extremely deatiled technical analysis and appendices) and background documents
  
  
• Business Travel Coalition: Comments
  
  
• Privacilla.org: Comments and press release
  
  
• Association of Corporate Travel Executives (ACTE): member poll and earlier press releases

Also, there have been a flurry of news stories on RFID passports in the last week, including addditional reports on the USA government’s claim that the so-called “contactless integrated circuits (IC’s)” or “smart cards” in passports aren’t really RFID chips (even though they are), as an attempt at spin control to dissociate the passport scheme from the reputation of RFID as a surveillance, not security, technology.

[Addendum, 20 August 2005: The format doesn’t make them easy to navigate or browse, but the State Department has posted more than 2000 of the comments they received on their Web site. I didn’t read them all, but all those of the comments I sampled were opposed to the RFID passport proposal.]