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Lawmakers challenge need for biometric chips in passports
Leading members of the House Judiciary Committee’s Immigration, Border Security and Claims subcommittee yesterday challenged the widespread view that U.S. requirements on foreign passports mean that those passports will have a biometric chip as an identifier.
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The full committee and subcommittee chairmen held that countries could comply with the federal government’s passport law by using secure digital photographs instead, a viewpoint that calls into question the need for Congress to extend an Oct. 26 deadline for the countries to establish biometric passport programs.
The deadline extension question is critical, because if the U.S. begins to require visas from travelers arriving from the “visa waiver” countries, the State Department could be forced to process millions of additional visa applications annually. In addition, millions of American travelers to countries such as France, Germany, Japan, Australia and Great Britain probably would have to get visas from those countries before leaving.
The Bush administration is widely expected to ask Congress to extend the Oct. 26 deadline for an additional year, following a one-year extension Congress granted last year.
In testimony before the subcommittee, Elaine Dezenski, the Homeland Security Department’s acting assistant secretary for policy and planning in the Border and Transportation Security Directorate, said secretary Michael Chertoff planned to meet with Judiciary Committee chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) in the next few weeks to discuss topics such as a deadline extension.
But in comments he submitted to the hearing, Sensenbrenner cast doubt on the possibility that he would approve a blanket deadline extension. He emphasized that the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002, which mandated biometric passports, called only for a biometric identifier—which could be a digital photograph—rather than requiring a chip.
The law requires that the biometric passports comply with standards set by the International Civil Aviation Organization. When the law was passed, ICAO was honing standards for digital photographs. Since 2002, ICAO has been developing standards for contactless chips.
“Congress, in passing the act, anticipated that ICAO would establish reasonable, cost-effective standards which relied on existing technology,” Sensenbrenner wrote. “That the ICAO would become enmeshed in new and unproven technology, and that the [European Union] should choose an elaborate and expensive path to meet the requirement has led to consequences that are regrettable, but not insurmountable.”
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