“Islamic State’s Authentic-Looking Fake Passports Pose Threat” (WSJ, December 23, 2015):
Islamic State has likely obtained equipment and blank passport books needed to make Syrian passports when the group took control of the Syrian cities of Raqqa and Deir Ezzour, those officials said. It has also gained control of materials to make Iraqi passports when it occupied the Iraqi city of Mosul, a Belgian counterterrorism official disclosed for the first time.
Frontex, the European Union’s border agency, has recently sent document experts to Leros and other Greek islands to pick out fake passports. But there are now only 10 experts, and identifying a fake that has been printed on real Syrian passport books with real equipment is very difficult, a Frontex spokeswoman said.
It seems strange that in our electronic age paper passports are still in use. The U.S. passport is an electronic device with a paper cover (source), but other countries are apparently still relying primarily on paper (which means that we who accept travelers or immigrants from those countries are also relying on paper). Biometric passports are apparently in the far distant future for most countries.
Given the amount of time and energy that goes into fretting about people who move from one country to another, why isn’t there more discussion of biometric passports?
Most commercial nuclear generating stations use the combination of photo ID badge card reader plus palm scan reader at all entry/access points. The ID badge is programmed to your allowed level of access depending on your job. All employees and contractors are photographed, finger printed, and palm scanned as part of site access procedure. As well as drug tested. For contractor unescorted access the process may take several days depending on how current your last background check is.
I suppose it’s possible to use something like this in the passport system. Potential downside is timely update of worldwide database. You computer/network/database folks can speak to this.
A better question might be, what’s the bribe to get a genuine passport right from an official.
The paper part seems still to be the most difficult. The biometric content seems much easier to get.
Finger prints (thin transparent foil to stick invisibly on you fingers) can be purchased for a few dollar from China and hackers reported already in 2008 that the chip in the passport is easier to insert or to change than getting the right paper around it.
Hackers expose security flaws with ‘Elvis Presley’ passport
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/19/passport.security/index.html
Hackers Publish German Minister’s Fingerprint
http://www.wired.com/2008/03/hackers-publish/
And like Tom said – just get a genuine passport right from an official. The return of investment is very quick. What you pay an official in Syria or Greece is less than what you get in Germany or Sweden in social aid already during the first three months.
As an intermediate step, all countries could maintain computer servers to validate passport info. Any other country could query whether a given name, id number, etc is valid. That would also allow revoking passports if stolen or faked. I am surprised this is not already done.
Forget my last comment. We do not even know how many people are overstaying their visas to the USA. We cannot expect Syria to keep track of issued passports.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/02/us/politics/us-doesnt-know-how-many-foreign-visitors-overstay-visas.html
Hi Philip
Is there a way to have your daily blog show up in my inbox? I would like to subscribe and read what you have to say – at least every three months he he .
Dave G
(Sue Wises cuz)
Where non-kosher passports are concerned, there are 4 basic types, listed here in the order of their (by me perceived as apparent) utility/ worth to the buyer:
(a) GENUINE THING, stolen or illicitly bought from the bearer for the purpose of a quick one-time passage (after which it will be reported as missing, and thus officially invalidated). The traveler needs to resemble the original photo to some degree; entry to a non-issuer-state destination is practically guaranteed.
(b) ILLICIT passport issued to the bearer by a corrupt official/ diplomat of the issuing, usually war-torn country, hence with no immediate trace capabilities of where the passport blanks ended up. Their value depends on which country’s passport it is… e.g. the Libyan ones being worthless even in North Africa. Also, once the serial numbers range, or other signifiers have been identified as suspect, this type of passport will be subjected to extra border scrutiny and rejection.
(c) STOLEN PASSPORT that has expertly been altered for the bearer, and is discarded/ destroyed once onboard a plane or a ferry to a safe haven where one will seek asylum. Destination countries frown on usage of stolen passports, and they’d spot the alteration anyway, so it is always easier to claim that the smuggler confiscated it.
(d) FAKE “PASSPORT” (cobbled together from discarded genuine parts of others), good at most for impromptu identification for in-country ferry etc boarding, but not for border passage/ admittance.
Given that there is no centralized “passport market,” and English papers tend to lean towards the sensational “how cheap it is to buy one,” it is not easy to arrive at a PLAUSIBLE median cost of a generally USABLE border-passage document. The figures in the rags vary wildly from £700 to $25,000. The ones I pay heed to tend to be at the higher end, €10,000 for a German passport of a specific bearer, half of it paid in advance to “an escrow” in Belgium, the other half on delivery in Turkey. Or a €15000+ one for a Pakistani woman with 2 inscribed children attempting to join a relative, a brother(?), already in Sweden (attempt unsuccessful, family sent back to Austria where they originally landed, and from which they probably will be deported; type of passport unknown, but the woman complained loudly on camera that not even paying all that money secured her the passage).
The DarkNet prices for illicit passports are in the range of $2,000-5,000, but presumably lower than those in the souk (because of their never guaranteed delivery by standard postal route).
[edited for length by moderator]
Dave: I think that what you want is an “RSS to Email gateway”. I did a Google search for that and http://www.rssfwd.com/index.aspx is an example. http://www.feed-readers.com/email-based-aggregators.htm is a page that lists some more.
If passports were not paper documents a slew of government jobs would disappear.
ISIS or whatever it is really called claims to be running a new country, so they should be issuing their own passports.
Ed, “ISIS or whatever it is really called” may call itself whatever it wants, a caliphate, or an Islamic state, but, long as it isn’t recognized as such by its immediate neighbors, not to mention the major geo-political powers, it will remain but an empty label of a—more apt description—FAILED state (as are those of Libya and Somalia). As such, I’m pretty sure that enabling own subordinates to legally escape its “umbrella of influence” is pretty low down their priorities.
Even were they good for travel to some intermediate, neutral territory, any passports that ISIS might issue elsewhere would rate but a vacation with the full 24/7 interrogation package, and then, at best, no admittance, or deportation—then in a stylish silk hood and orange jumpsuit that’s lately all the rage on catwalks, and with a doctor-prescribed sedative suppository if need be.