South Africa – Biometric passports
Posted on 19. Apr, 2009 by Robert in news
I found this very interesting article that I had to share.
The South African Department of Home Affairs has begun rolling out security enhanced passports to new applicants from this week.
A facility in Pretoria which prints the new passports was officially opened last week by the minister of home affairs, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula. Until now South African passports were produced in bulk overseas and personalised locally.
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The new South African passport was due to be introduced in 2007, but was plagued with delays and has cost around R500m (£36m) to implement.
The initiative forms part of a Turnaround Programme aimed at improving customer service and stamping out forgery. The new passports bring South Africa into line with International Civil Aviation Organisation standards for technology and security, which were revamped following the 2001 terror attacks in New York.
The new passports have an embedded RFID chip which stores the owner’s biometric information, including personal details, a high-resolution colour photograph and fingerprint information.
Several security features are designed to make it extremely difficult to forge, according to the government, principally the back page which now consists of seven layers of polycarbonate, each with an individual security feature.
Rather than placing a physical photo on the page covered in laminate, the passport holder’s photo is laser-engraved on one of the polycarbonate layers, as is a copy of their biographical data.
The paper used for the other pages of the passport includes a watermark of Chief Albert Luthuli, and designs depicting the Big Five along with perforations making out the passport number. Other security features include interlocking stitching to prevent pages being removed or tampered with, and micro threads embedded in each page which store a form of uniquely identifiable ‘DNA’.
read more: here
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Kathleen
Apr 20th, 2009
Maybe life and things of life are looking up and forward . Pray nothinf can or goes wrong with this brilliant idea and all issues are and always will be legal .