EU biometric passports not that safe, experts say

country, said Svenningson: “In some countries, it’s very easy, others not so easy, but every country has their own loopholes.”

Loopholes

Phillips notes that first of all, the inclusion of the biometric identifiers is binding only for those countries in the Schengen area, of which the United Kingdom and Ireland have opted out and which Cyprus, Bulgaria, and Romania have yet to join. These specifications are also binding on European Economic Area countries Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland.

According to the EU regulation, countries were to have included both facial imagery and fingerprints in their systems by July last year. The British e-passport meanwhile only uses a digital image and not fingerprinting, although this is currently under consideration by authorities.

The Dubai passports taken from British citizens were in any case not biometric, which makes the forgery process that much easier. Svenningson said, though, that one of the easiest methods is to acquire a duplicate passport — “a real fake passport”—  rather than to forge one.

“The problem is enrollment and lies with the breeder documents. These are the documents that make you a for example a British or German citizen,” such as a birth certificate or naturalization papers. “These documents plus the biographic data and the biometric data are then unified and stored in a passport tied together, forming a proof of identity.”

According to Svenningson, you should choose a victim that roughly matches your appearance, and then photoshop an image of yourself so that it appears closer to what the original person looks like, something in between you and the other person.

This process is aided by “the transfer of a paper photo to a digital one, which involves a huge loss of quality, resulting in a photo that makes it very easy for others to use.”

“When all this is done, you apply for renewal of your victim’s passport and file a new application with your tailored picture. Then you wait at his or her mailbox of until the new passport arrives by mail and snatch that particular letter.” He added that a postbox that is separate from the apartment or house is best.

This method is the most common, he said. The advent of biometric passports has had an effect: “There has been a big shift in the last five years from counterfeiting to applying for a real one,” because of the additional hurdles set up by biometry.

Fingerprints can be fooled

Those countries that require fingerprints