Ed Felten has an informative blog post about the U.S. government’s proposed radio-enabled passports. After a short discussion of some of the potential problems with this technology, and why the government didn’t go with a technology that reads passport info only on contact, Ed concludes:
It seems that the decision to use contactless technology was made without fully understanding its consequences, relying on technical assurances from people who had products to sell. Now that the problems with that decision have become obvious, it’s late in the process and would be expensive and embarrassing to back out. In short, this looks like another flawed technology procurement program.