Within a few years some countries will use electronic passports. The technical design of the identificationchips is almost finished. The German company Infineon has finished research and is busy to stabilize the system. The chip could carry three biological human features such as a fingerprint, irisprint and a digital photo.

The only bottleneck of this system is privacy because countries cannot store all this information in large databases without breaking a privacy rule.

The information on the chip should also be encrypted and protected because of fraud, otherwise this is a dangerous system. Why not keep the normal paper passports.

See some related information at http://www.eetimes.com/sys/news/OEG20030609S0062