Interior ministers of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the US and Russia began working consultations as early as the week before last in Paris. And this past Monday, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy summed up the first results of the discussion on high-tech passports: "We all agreed that the time has come to use biometrics to establish a person's identity." However, the minister stressed that the parties have not yet agreed on which biometric indicators would be most convenient and effective.
The British newspaper The Daily Telegraph notes that the initiative for the speedy transition to new passports comes from the United States. Washington considers microchips with personal information about a citizen a weapon in the fight against international terrorism. US Attorney General John Ashcroft, who attended the meeting, made it clear that the States see merit in entering comprehensive biometric information about a person into the new passports. This means recording at least two indicators on the microchip: fingerprint data and retina data. Ministers of other countries believe that at the first stage it is reasonable to use only fingerprints as such data.
G8 ministers also disagree on the timing of introducing the new passports. The United States insists that the issue be fundamentally resolved by October 2004. Washington hopes that by that time the G8 countries will agree on the most effective means of biometric identification and sign all necessary documents.
Several G8 ministers immediately spoke out against haste on this issue. British Interior Minister David Blunkett warned that too rapid introduction of high-tech passports would inevitably hit the tourism industry. And Russian Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov identified another problem: Russia, he said, simply will not have time to switch to new passports within the timeframe set by the United States. "October next year is unrealistic for us; this work will take much longer, but it must be started," the Russian minister stated.
Nevertheless, Gazeta.Ru writes further, it can be said that the process of switching to new passports has already begun: the ministers agreed to create a working commission by the end of this year. It will be headed by representatives of the United States and France. The commission will need to select the best technologies for entering citizens' biometric data into passports. According to the Daily Telegraph, certain elements of the new system are already being tested by British customs services. The Russian side also has some experience: according to Boris Gryzlov, Russia has an archive of about 10 million scanned fingerprints.
According to most experts' calculations, new high-tech passports could be introduced in the G8 countries within the next five years. For Russia, this means exchanging old international passports for new ones.
The idea of entering biometric data into documents is not new, and similar proposals have already been made in Russia. Even before the exchange of internal Soviet passports for Russian ones, the Interior Ministry proposed including a photograph of the holder's fingerprint in the new documents. As Viktor Prokopov, deputy head of the Main Criminal Investigation Department, explained at the time, such a measure would help in searching for missing persons and in determining the authenticity of passports. However, due to a lack of funding and protests by human rights activists, this idea did not go through.
Last autumn, Russian scientists developed a special system that allows fingerprints to be entered into a passport made in the form of a plastic card. On the front side of such a card, it was proposed to place the holder's photograph, number, and traditional passport data (full name, place of registration, where and when the document was issued, etc.), and on the back - images of two fingerprints. According to specialists' calculations, the process of making a card passport should take no more than a minute (including the time needed to send information to the database). Local police departments and then patrol officers could be equipped with special scanners allowing them to compare a fingerprint with passport data.
According to the developers of the Russian system, it surpasses all existing foreign systems (for example, the American system requires the use of two types of scanners: one for fingers and another for cards). Therefore, government agencies in India, China, Vietnam, and even the United States have shown interest in it. However, Russian police officers have not yet shown interest in it: according to Interior Ministry officials, implementing such a system would require serious funding. And there is no additional money in the budget for such needs. In addition, Russian human rights organizations continue to oppose mandatory fingerprints in passports.
Vasily Sergeyev,
Irina Petrakova