The British Post Office has unveiled a handy instructional film on how to register your fingerprint as your identity:
Tag Archives | Passports
CIA’s Secret Fear: High-Tech Border Checks Will Blow Spies’ Cover
The Watchmen’s tools working against the Watchers? Jeff Stein writes on WIRED’s Danger Room:
When Tom Cruise had to break into police headquarters in Minority Report, the futuristic crime thriller, he got past the iris scanners with ease: He just swapped out his eyeballs.
CIA agents may find that just a little beyond the call of duty. But meanwhile, they’ve got to come up with something else: The increasing deployment of iris scanners and biometric passports at worldwide airports, hotels and business headquarters, designed to catch terrorists and criminals, are playing havoc with operations that require CIA spies to travel under false identities.
Busy spy crossroads such as Dubai, Jordan, India and many EU points of entry are employing iris scanners to link eyeballs irrevocably to a particular name. Likewise, the increasing use of biometric passports, which are embedded with microchips containing a person’s face, sex, fingerprints, date and place of birth, and other personal data, are increasingly replacing the old paper ones.
‘X’ Now A Gender Option In Australian Passports
A forward-thinking move, as the gender-ambiguous can now classify themselves as ‘X’. Still no “android” or “monkey-man” passport options, though. Associated Press reports:
Australian passports will now have three gender options – male, female and indeterminate – under new guidelines to remove discrimination against transgender and intersex people, the government said Thursday. Intersex people, who are biologically not entirely male or female, will be able to list their gender on passports as “X.”
Previously, gender was a choice of only male or female, and people were not allowed to change their gender on their passport without having had a sex-change operation. The U.S. dropped the surgery prerequisite for transgender people’s passports last year.
Any country that complies with the International Civil Aviation Organization’s specifications for machine-readable passports can choose to introduce a gender “X.”
“‘X’ is really quite important because there are people who are indeed genetically ambiguous and were probably arbitrarily assigned as one sex or the other at birth,” Pratt said.
Mark Frauenfelder: ‘Passport Ownership Prevents Diabetes’
Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing writes, “It’s conclusive: owning a passport will prevent you from becoming diabetic.”… Read the rest
