Geisha Kow­lessar

With just the swipe of a card, T&T cit­i­zens can be al­lowed to en­ter a for­eign coun­try. This will hap­pen when the Gov­ern­ment moves to in­tro­duce the e-pass­port, or dig­i­tal pass­port, by 2017. Mak­ing the state­ment yes­ter­day was Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Jack Warn­er at the Hilton Trinidad and Con­fer­ence Cen­tre, Port-of-Spain.

He was speak­ing at the launch of a three-day sub-re­gion­al work­shop on ca­pac­i­ty-build­ing in trav­el-doc­u­ment se­cu­ri­ty and iden­ti­ty man­age­ment, which brought to­geth­er var­i­ous Caribbean coun­tries. He said since T&T in­tro­duced the in­te­grat­ed bor­der-man­age­ment sys­tem in 2007, there has been no re­port­ed cas­es of tam­per­ing with the ma­chine-read­able pass­port.

"The In­ter­na­tion­al Civ­il Avi­a­tion Or­gan­i­sa­tion (ICAO) has is­sued a man­date to all coun­tries to ful­ly op­er­a­tionalise e-pass­port use by 2017. "I am ad­vised T&T should get an ini­tial pi­lot roll-out by 2015. This pi­lot roll-out can be done, just as some oth­er coun­tries have, with diplo­mats and gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials first," Warn­er said.

While us­ing e-pass­ports could in­crease the ef­fi­cien­cy both for the Gov­ern­ment and cit­i­zens, there were oth­er fac­tors which the Gov­ern­ment must con­sid­er, he point­ed out. The e-pass­port, he added, would elim­i­nate the process of in­di­vid­u­als hav­ing to join a line to ap­pear be­fore an im­mi­gra­tion of­fi­cer.

"The in­di­vid­ual sim­ply swipes his e-pass­port and looks in­to the kiosk, which reads the bio-da­ta in the e-pass­port chip and con­firms the iden­ti­ty of the per­son, us­ing fa­cial-recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy," Warn­er said. How­ev­er, he said, it al­so would mean there would be no need for so many im­mi­gra­tion of­fi­cers.

They would there­fore have to be de­ployed else­where to per­form oth­er tasks re­lat­ed to bor­der se­cu­ri­ty, Warn­er said. Cost was an­oth­er fac­tor which the Gov­ern­ment had to take in­to ac­count. "There are chal­lenges to the e-pass­port roll-out. There is a lengthy cer­ti­fi­ca­tion process and we will have to look at the spa­tial re­quire­ments as well as hu­man re­source is­sues, such as re­train­ing, re-tool­ing and skill en­hance­ment.

Pass­port changes for bet­ter bor­der con­trol

"We al­so have to con­sid­er that the base book for an e-pass­port costs five times as much as a base book for a ma­chine-read­able pass­port. There­fore the cost of an e-pass­port would be high­er," Warn­er said.

What is e-pass­port

A bio­met­ric pass­port, al­so known as an e-pass­port or a dig­i­tal pass­port, is a com­bined pa­per and elec­tron­ic pass­port that con­tains bio­met­ric in­for­ma­tion that can be used to au­then­ti­cate the iden­ti­ty of trav­ellers. It us­es con­tact­less smart card tech­nol­o­gy, in­clud­ing a mi­cro­proces­sor chip (com­put­er chip) and an­ten­na (for both pow­er to the chip and com­mu­ni­ca­tion) em­bed­ded in the front or back cov­er, or cen­tre page, of the pass­port.

The pass­port's crit­i­cal in­for­ma­tion is both print­ed on the da­ta page of the pass­port and stored in the chip. Pub­lic Key In­fra­struc­ture (PKI) is used to au­then­ti­cate the da­ta stored elec­tron­i­cal­ly in the pass­port chip, mak­ing it ex­pen­sive and dif­fi­cult to forge when all se­cu­ri­ty mech­a­nisms are ful­ly and cor­rect­ly im­ple­ment­ed.