[amoni]

How would you like it if someone you've never met could read your most personal details from afar?

If you are an American, you may soon have no choice. In the same week that the US Food and Drug Administration approved the use of implantable radio frequency ID (RFID) tags to identify patients and bring up their medical records, the US Department of Homeland Security has ordered a million of these tags to be implanted in the passports of American citizens.

The tags will allow customs officers to scan passports and automatically bring up personal details and biometric data on the holder, just by placing it close to an electronic reading device. Axalto, a leading French-based RFID chip maker, was awarded a contract on 14 October to begin producing US passport covers with RFID chips embedded in them. The US printing office expects to bring out a million of these new passports in 2005 and introduce them as standard by 2006. The US currently produces more than 7 million passports each year.

RFID tags were originally developed as a sort of remote replacement for product barcodes. But privacy campaigners say using them to identify people can be dangerous. Because the tags can be read from a distance, it is possible that people could be surreptitiously picked out in a crowd and targeted on the basis of their nationality, or other specific details.