Terrorism: Immigration Service to Screen all e-Passports

The presidency has ordered the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) to rejig its document examination and recognition procedure, to address the growing concerns of illegal immigration, terrorism and identity theft, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek can now reveal.
The move followed the frightening reports, which indicate that some 13 million missing passports floating around the world could pose real security threat to the country.
President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua is said to be worried that theft of passports and identities are connected with international terrorism as terrorist groups and their operatives have demonstrated the propensity to travel in order to meet, organize, train, plan, reconnoiter targets, and deploy for attacks.
Sources at the presidency said that the NIS has now been ordered to conduct thorough first line inspection of every passport coming or going out from every port of entry into the country including the cover, kinds of ink, binding, number, authorization stamps, how the photograph is fixed, foils/laminates, pages, stolen blank document as well as fantasy documents.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that despite the enhanced security features of the current e-passport issued by the NIS, creative thieves have continued to find other ways to steal identities.
The e-passport represents a bold initiative in the deployment of two new technologies: Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) and biometrics.
It is also the harbinger of a wave of next-generation ID cards and the federal government’s plan to deploy identity cards integrating radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and biometrics for domestic use.
But surprising discoveries show that the e-passport is easy to copy, which poses a grave security risk.
Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that around the world, governments are adding RFID tags to passports as a way to fight counterfeiting.
RFID tags have some dangers and one is data leakage.
By design, RFID tags can be read by readers. In their current design, a slightly opened passport would be detectable.
Even the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) — the United Nations body that established the standards for electronic passports, anticipated this problem of creating fake passport chips and actually put an anti-cloning measure in its standard — active authentication.
With support of government of Netherlands, the NIS now has a system for detecting a fake passport chip.
The Nigeria Immigration passport reader in Abuja can now instantly check the database to determine if the signature on the chip in a U.S. passport matches the signature that the U.S. supplied to the Public Key Directory (PDK).
PKD contains the signature codes of each of the countries that issue e-passports.