South Africa Rolls Out Biometric Passports 60
volume4 writes "The South African Department of Home Affairs has begun rolling out security enhanced passports to new applicants from this week. A facility in Pretoria which prints the new passports was officially opened last week by the minister of home affairs, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula. The new passports have an embedded RFID chip which stores the owner's biometric information, including personal details, a high-resolution colour photograph and fingerprint information."
Re:Mixed emotions... (Score:3, Insightful)
And more jeers to worrying about passports when they have an obscene HIV rate and I'm guessing not that much of a threat from terrorism. Not to say you can't do both, but until they get their HIV epidemic under control I don't know what they're doing spending money to update passports.
Re:Mixed emotions... (Score:3, Insightful)
Who gives a crap about HIV? HIV infection can be prevented. The methods for prevention are known. Clinics provide free condoms to anyone. What more would you like them to do?
The real issues are unemployment, poverty, lack of education, racist politicians repeating the injustices of the past and crime.
The HIV infection ratio is 18.1%
The unemployment ratio is 21.7%
Literacy: 86.4%
GDP per capita: 10000 USD
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sf.html [cia.gov]
Jesus Christ! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Mixed emotions... (Score:5, Insightful)
HIV infection can be prevented.
By taking a shower, according to your soon-to-be-President.
Re:Lots of countries have this (Score:3, Insightful)
That's about implanted RFID chips causing cancer, which sounds quite plausible - putting a foreign object in your body usually isn't a good idea. There's no evidence to suggest that an RFID chip in your passport has any effect on you (except for psychological implications).
Worst off is their AIDS policy (Score:3, Insightful)
tracking citizens (Score:2, Insightful)
Doesn't anyone else see this as just a system for tracking ordinary citizens?
Tracking citizens: the hallmark of the totalitarian state.
Re:Corruption (Score:2, Insightful)
Those fingerprints are verified against what? They can take blood, semen and iris scans for all it matters. There is no way to verify who those biometrics really belong to.
I can walk into a Home Affairs office, slip someone a wad of cash and get an ID book under the name Wile E Coyote. Once that's through the system, I then go back and get a passport with my biometrics tied to that dodgy name.
Granted, you can't do it twice (they'll have your data from the first passport), but if you're fresh from Al Queada boot camp and looking to get into the USA, you're only going to do it once anyway.
Re:tracking citizens (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, not off hand.
To use it to track ordinary citizens, you'd also have to:
1. require all citizens to have an RFID passport
2. require all citizens to CARRY said RFID passport at all times
3. ban the use of RF-blocking wallets or passport cases
4. install a large number of high-powered RFID readers all over the major cities, etc, so you could read the RFID passports covertly as people moved around.
If you do all of that (and vigorously enforce items 1 through 3), then you can use it to track ordinary citizens.