DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Back in September, security guru and common-sense advocate Bruce Schneier recommended that US citizens renew their passports before the end of the year. The reason? To avoid the risks of the new RFID passports, initially slated to be rolled out by January 1.

Schneier described potential consequences of carrying around a radio transmitter in one’s passport:

The risk to you is the possibility of surreptitious access: Your passport information might be read without your knowledge or consent by a government trying to track your movements, a criminal trying to steal your identity or someone just curious about your citizenship.

I called the Passport Agency earlier this month to ask whether they’d begun issuing RFID passports yet. I was told that the main Passport center in Philadelphia — the one that all mailed-in renewal requests go to — had a warehouse full of the old, non-electronic passport jackets that they would need to use up before rolling out the RFID model.

That’s good news in at least two respects, the less obvious one being that the government had avoided sending tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of perfectly useful passport jackets into the local landfill.

The Agency representative couldn’t tell me how long their stock of radio-free passport jackets would last, but she speculated that they’d still be issuing them for at least a few weeks, and likely past the first of January. So, despite the fact that my old passport wouldn’t expire for four years, I sent in a renewal request two weeks ago.

Today I got my new, radio-free passport in the mail. RFID hax0rz can kiss my analog butt, at least for 10 more years.

If you want to avoid the frog-march of progress, start at the passport renewal page at the Dept. of State website. You’ll need a pair of passport photos; I recommend Fedex Kinko’s. Most offer Passport photo services. You’ll probably also want to pay the extra $60 for “expedited” processing, to jump your application to the head of the line.

But you may want to call the Passport Agency first, because at this point your attempt to be one of the last people to get an old passport might lead to being one of the first to get a new one. Call 1-877-487-2778 and ask to speak to a passport agent.