Probation in passport-peeking case

A former State Department contractor who illegally looked up passport information for nearly 200 celebrities, athletes, actors and politicians has been sentenced to a year of probation.

Seven Reasons Why Barack Obama Should make the Birth Certificate Controversy go Away

The question of whether Barack Obama was actually born in Kenya thus disqualifying him to run as a presidential candidate will not go away. It is like the little mushrooms that appear every morning under the tree, they keep coming back. What should the President Elect do?

U.S. Passports: made overseas, obscenely profitable

The new technology allows border guards to scan the passport and wirelessly access information encoded in the computer chip. Producing these new passports costs the GPO $7.97, which it marks up to $15 to sell to the State Department. The State Dept.

UK: Passports will be needed to buy mobile phones

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

RFID passport hack has scanner seeing visions of Elvis

Back in August, a security researcher named Jeroen van Beek demonstrated a method for manipulating information in the RFID tags used in recent passports; more details of the process were discussed at the Black Hat conference held in Las Vegas that month.