Just ask your favorite State Department worker. In fact, it is so great, they are going to start putting them in passports by the end of next month (http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/13/pf/rfid_passports/index.htm). Coming soon to an airport near you, you can just waive your passport in front of their reader and they will have all your information. Sounds great right? Saves you that pesky 2 seconds it takes for the person at the desk to actually open your passport up. After a mere 43,200 passport scans, you will have saved an entire day of your life! Kind of makes me want to take up international travel again.
But seriously. This is the stupidest idea ever. Do the people at the State department not read the news? The Dutch government tried the same thing just one year ago. Their encryption was cracked in something like two weeks. Not only that, but people with readers could obtain a person’s passport information as it was scanned at immigration from something on the order of 50 feet away. The Dutch government corrected that problem by putting (I believe) Gaussian cages around the passport readers. But, what’s to stop someone from energizing your RFID chip as you walk through the door to their business or something?
The encryption the State Department intends to use will get broken someday. Then your RFID passport could be a liability. They claim the purpose of the chip is to cut down on human error but a human is reviewing the information on a computer screen instead of a passport. Are they less likely to make an error looking at a computer screen? I doubt it.