Thousands of Passports Missing

In the United Kingdom, the Foreign Office may have reached some milestone of security infamy. The Foreign Office has had thousands of blank passports stolen:

“Thousands of stolen passports worth millions of pounds could be used for fraudulent or terrorist activity, experts warned yesterday. The Foreign Office admitted a serious breach of security when a van carrying the blank passports was hijacked outside a shop in Oldham, Greater Manchester, on Monday morning. A spokesman confirmed that 24 parcels containing blank passports and vignettes, used for visa inserts, were taken from a van travelling from a printers in Oldham to RAF Northolt, north-west London.”

link: Thousands of blank passports stolen in raid could be used in fraud or terrorism

This is a security breach that not only impacts on the United Kingdom. Foreign nationals may have liberal access to other countries on forged documentation. The biometric identifiers contained within the passports could be recognized as valid and legitimate. It is now a matter of international security having those identifiers registered as invalid and hope that whoever is in possession of these passports does not have RFID (radio frequency identification) sophistication to alter the codes. In terms of identity theft, it is a nightmare scenario. At present, banks and financial institutions do not scan for RFID identifiers and accept the passport as a legitimate form of security validation. The possible financial risks are staggering.

Catherine Forsythe