Miscellaneous -
Passports
Every day 550 UK
passports disappear, either lost by the owners or
stolen and then passed on to gangs, who sell them
on the black market for around £3,000. Home
Secretary David Blunkett said 46,273 passports
went missing in the first three months of 2003.
And the Passport Agency admitted that the total
number reported "stolen, lost or
unavailable" would hit 200,000 by December.
Police and immigration officials fear that tens
of thousands are falling into the hands of
terrorists and criminals, who use stolen
passports to forge new identities for illegal
immigrants and bogus asylum seekers. In May two
eastern Europeans who ran a passport forgery
factory from a flat on the South Coast were
jailed for helping illegal immigrants sneak into
Britain.
LibDem Simon Hughes said, "Britain is
suffering organised immigration fraud on a huge
and growing scale." Over 31,000 UK passports
went astray in 1998. That hit 114,624 in 2000 and
166,358 in 2002. The number of forged IDs and
passports seized at British ports soared by 46
per cent last year to a record 9,665, according
to Home Office figures. The number of passports
that went "missing" in the post last
year totalled 2,982, up from 2,541 in 2001. A
Passport Agency spokeswoman said, "The
losses remain a serious concern."
Traditional passports could have a computer chip
added with "biometric" information
about the holder - but at a price. The UK
Passport Service's business plan for the next
five years also revealed the cost of a passport
is to rise 58% from £33 to £52 by 2006.
Officials are to draw up plans for the new
"smart" passports by March 2004, and
hope to begin implementing the scheme by April
2005. The chip would carry facial recognition
data about the parameters of the passport
holder's face, such as the exact distance between
their eyes and the distance between their nose
and chin.
Within a year of the new hi-tech passport books,
the agency hopes to introduce a "passport
card" - similar to a credit card - to be
used in conjunction with the paper document. The
card would be valid for travel within the EU and
"certain other defined countries" and
would feature "up-to-date security and fraud
prevention features". It is likely to
feature extra biometric information such as an
iris scan or fingerprints, stored electronically
on the computer chip. It is also likely to form
the basis of Britain's compulsory national ID
card since the Second World War, if ministers
decide to go ahead with a scheme proposed by Home
Secretary David Blunkett.
A UK Passport Service spokeswoman said, "The
level of fee increase for passports has been kept
to a minimum and will enable the UKPS to provide
additional security features in passports and
improvements to existing fraud detection and
prevention systems. Fees will be reviewed on an
annual basis with increases being sought only as
and when absolutely necessary." And anyone
who believes that........
More
than 4.5 million people a year will have to go to
an interview to get a new passport from the end
of 2008. The interviews are part of plans to
replace traditional passport photos with
high-tech biometric data such as face scans,
fingerprints or iris scans and will check
people's identity with questions about their
previous addresses and their schools. The Home
Office said all 27 countries involved in the US
visa waiver scheme, and all EU countries, are
adopting biometric passports and without them,
travellers would need many more documents to be
able to travel between those nations. From the
end of 2006 first-time adult passport applicants
will be called to an interview at one of 70
centres nationwide.
From July 2006, all new passports will include a
computer chip which would initially contain only
facial scans. UK Passport Service chief Bernard
Herdan said, "The next stage will be putting
fingerprints into passports. We will be moving
from 600,000 being interviewed at the end of 2006
to interviewing more than 4.5m a year from the
end of 2008." Mr Herdan said the interviews
should take 10 minutes for "law-abiding
citizens". He added that private companies,
such as banks, would be able to have information
checked against passport details. "They
wouldn't have access to our database because it
is protected but they can send us data on the
passport and we can give them the green or red
light," he said.
A
holdall packed with enough fake passports and IDs
for several new terrorist cells was found near
Heathrow. The bag was stuffed with visas, forged
Home Office documents, bank cards and work
permits and was handed over to anti-terrorist
police by the News of the World. The bag was
spotted on a grass verge of a busy airport route
by a passing taxi driver who contacted the paper.
The passports inside were for Pakistani, Indian,
British, Nepalese and South African nationals and
contained fake visas in different shades of ink
from genuine documents. Photographs of the SAME
two men appear on DIFFERENT valid passports in
DIFFERENT names. The first man, a burly Asian, is
on two Indian passports in different names. The
second man is on a Pakistani passport and a
Portuguese passport in different names. The bag
also contained several pictures of one of the men
with his hair dyed differently in an attempt to
change his appearance. Other fake papers included
a car log book and a driving licence. (Source: News
of the World)
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