[HIB]Is U.K.'s New Passport Design More Secure Than the Last?

The U.K. Passport Office today released its latest iteration of the British passport, that once-blue, now Euro-burgundy booklet that lets British citizens into other countries. It's got a whole host of enhanced features, which the Chief Executive of the Identity and Passport Service claims will beef up security and clamp down on fraud. But will it?The 28-page passport includes a different drawing on every double-page spread that depict parts of the scepter'd isle. There are the White Cliffs of Dover, Wales's Gower Peninsula, Ben Nevis mountain in Scotland, and Northern Island's Giant's Causeway. But where is a true-to-life depiction of our urban life? No beautifully sketched CCTV camera winking from above a doorway, no group of girls staggering out of a bar on a hen night, no birds-eye view of the crowds of consumers on Oxford Street on a Sunday afternoon? Ah, they missed a trick.Anyhoo. This is the first passport redesign since biometric data was introduced to the travel documents, at the behest of Uncle Sam, and it's costing us little people in Blighty around $400 million. It's long been acknowledged that biometric data is hackable--earlier this year, Mossad is said to have cloned a bunch of British citizens' passports in order to carry out the assassination of the Hamas leader in Dubai.

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