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Australia is looking at trialling passport-less travel in a move Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop predicts will go global. The idea of cloud passports is the result of a hipster-style-hackathon held at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), which culminated in an X-Factor style audition before the secretary Peter Varghese, Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop, Assistant Minister Steve Ciobo and Chris Vein from the World Bank.
Under a cloud passport, a traveller's identity and biometrics data would be stored in a cloud, so passengers would no longer need to carry their passports and risk having them lost or stolen. DFAT says 38,718 passports were registered as lost or stolen in 2014-15, consistent with the 38,689 reported missing the previous year.
Australia and New Zealand are now in discussions about trialling cloud passports. Ms Bishop acknowledged there were security requirements that would have to be met in order to store biometrics in the cloud, but told Fairfax Media: "We think it will go global."
[Also Covered By]: Australia Is Testing Virtual Passports
(Score: 5, Insightful) by janrinok on Wednesday November 04 2015, @10:12AM
With various Governments' current record of security, I'm not sure that putting every passport holder's details into the 'cloud' is such a good idea. Maybe a few 10's of thousands of passports are reported missing each year, but that is significantly better than every passport being compromised, even those belonging to people who do not travel!
Of course, the same Governments will promise security and ease of use, but they haven't managed to achieve it so far. If it is secure then it will not be easy to use, so they will compromise on security to ensure that the system 'works' as they imagine it should, rather than being the secure system it is designed to be in the first instance.
This is the type of target that hackers/crackers dream about, and if/when they are successful at getting inside it, they will be able to steal the identities of a huge proportion of the nation in one attack. It is simply too big a prize not to try. But perhaps I am becoming a little more cynical in my old age ....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @02:50PM
"We think it will go global."
Australia is being used as a testing ground for one-world government.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @05:31PM
AFAIK, most countries have their passport databases with some sort of online access even today. Whether they've been broken into, we'll not really find out until somebody comes out (with this info)