Policy Podcast: Making a Passport, A Secure Procedure

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Patrick F. Kennedy, Under Secretary for Management
Sean McCormack, Department Spokesman

MR. MCCORMACK: Ambassador Pat Kennedy, thanks again for joining us to talk about passports. It’s been much in the news recently. What I’d like to do is just have you walk through the process, the production of the passport, because there have been a lot of questions about the fact that some of the components of the passport are produced overseas and people have raised questions about the security and why foreign firms have been engaged as part of this process.

So we have here the first element of the passport, so if you can kind of take us through the life of the passport and explain to folks how we do this?

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: Absolutely, Sean. I mean, the State Department is very, very concerned to make sure that when it produces a passport and gives it to an American citizen, it’s giving it to – only to American citizens and it is giving them a very, very secure document. When we began to move towards the – producing a passport with an electronic chip in it, we get our passports from the Government Printing Office, which, by law, prints our passports for us. And the GPO was unable to locate an American firm in order to provide some of the beginning of the raw materials for the passport.

MR. MCCORMACK: Let me ask you one question. Where is the chip on the passport just so people can --

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: The chip, Sean, is in the very back of the passport up inside the back cover.

MR. MCCORMACK: So you can’t even see it?

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: You can’t even see it, but --

MR. MCCORMACK: Now let me ask you a crazy question, okay? You can’t use this chip to track people as they’re walking around with their passport?

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: Absolutely not, absolutely not. A passport, Sean, starts – starts as a piece of plastic and you can see here, it’s a blue piece of plastic and obviously, when you fold it in half and then cut it in thirds, you end up with exactly the size of an American passport. This is the only piece that is actually produced overseas. It is a blue piece of plastic and inside in the back, there are three little chips. And these chips have memory capability, but when we buy them, there’s nothing written on them. It’s as if you went to your local office supply store and bought a package of CD-ROMs or disks to use in your computer. There’s nothing here. There’s nothing on them.

MR. MCCORMACK: So these --

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: These little, little black dots are the chips and because of the way this is done – this is, as I said, cut into three pieces so they have the raw material here for three.

MR. MCCORMACK: Right.

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: There is no information on here, there is nothing there. You can buy these chips all over the world because they’re simply a memory chip to – in which you write something to it once and then you can read it many times.

MR. MCCORMACK: But the specifications for the chips we need were only available from two companies?

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: No, they were available from – only from several companies overseas and it was – the Government Printing Office had the specifications. The U.S. has entered into agreement, through the International Civil Aviation Organization, with other governments around the world to produce a passport book which is this size and with the chip in the back of it that has a certain standard to it. So it is not until this piece of plastic arrives in the United States that you actually really, in my opinion, start producing a passport.

MR. MCCORMACK: Right.

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: This piece of plastic will arrive at a secure U.S. Government facility, the Government Printing Office’s printing plant in Washington, D.C., and they then begin the work on it. They then print the cover. They then print, and I don’t know if your viewers can see this detail, but if they have their own passports, they can. The fine detailed printing in the passport that makes it clear that it’s not, just anybody made it.

MR. MCCORMACK: So there are a lot of security (inaudible) --

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: There are a lot of security --

MR. MCCORMACK: -- embedded, like in your five-dollar bill or a ten or a twenty dollar bill.

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: That’s right. There’s micro printing and there is a sailing ship and there’s a seagull and there’s a buffalo and there’s Mount Rushmore, all this fine printing. And then they also print the back of this and then the GPO laminates this all together, stitches it into a book, and in the process of doing this, the only thing they do to the chip is they format the chip, just as you might format --

MR. MCCORMACK: Put the operating system, so to speak, on it?

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: That’s right, on it. But after they put the format on it, they lock the chip and then they load a load of passport books into an armored car and the armored car takes these passport books to the 16 facilities that the State Department has around the United States to go – to take the next step. But as I mentioned, they lock the chip. They ship the key, in effect, to all these chips to those 16 passport facilities via separate means. So there’s no passport, raw book, until after it hits the United States. But even if someone should, per chance, get a hold of these things, they would not be able to do anything with the chip because the keys to the chip are moving separately. They then arrive at a state – one of the State Department passport facilities: New York, Houston, San Francisco, Boston or wherever. And then the books are under the control of State Department personnel at our guarded facilities. And then they are what is called personalized. The personal data is put onto the passport, typed on here, and then they are also at that point loaded onto the chip. And that is when it really becomes and American passport.

But there’s some other security features here. If you were wandering through an airport or wandering somewhere and somewhat had an electronic device and tried to read your passport, if the passport book is closed like this, there’s an anti-skimming feature in here. So if I came up and passed by you with this one, if the book is closed, you’re not going to read anything. The only time it can be read is when it’s opened and then it is scanned by the customs and border patrol officer at the port of entry and then he or she can check this and then checks you. And then as he or she skims this, the machine then reads the chip. And so if somehow you have managed to cut out this page and try to sew another one in which is almost, if not impossible to do, the way it’s put together. The customs and border patrol at the post is going to see a picture and information, but the chip is going to be giving him or her different information, which makes this a very, very secure document produced in the United States.

MR. MCCORMACK: Let me ask you one. Let me back up one – a few steps here and just ask you a question. All right, say we have our pieces of plastic and say there’s somebody in one of these plants who has a stack of these things and they have the intention of counterfeiting, getting to this stage. There are a lot of clever people out there. What’s to say you can’t take these pieces of plastic and print the front and produce these inside pages and load the stuff up on the chip. Is that possible to do?

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: Well, first of all, we work very closely with the printers overseas. All of the printers have security operations at their plant that control the material. But let us just say that -- not at one of these plants, let’s just say that somebody took --

MR. MCCORMACK: Or on the way -- are on the way.

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: -- or somebody took an American passport and said, ah, this is such and such a shade of blue and I’m going to simply go and have plastic made up of this shade of blue and then going to try to duplicate an American passport. Because of the material that we load on to this chip and how that chip lines up with the material here and what the computer that the Customs and Border patrol have what that machine is taught to read, if you have a phony passport with a phony chip, it’s going to go tilt, when the customs and border patrol officer attempts to validate it.

MR. MCCORMACK: One last question for you about the chip itself. I’ve read a story -- I haven’t looked into it myself – people claiming they can hack these chips. Is that possible or do you think that’s possible?

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: We – there is a system called PKI, Public Key Infrastructure that is a type of security algorithm loaded onto the chip and we do that ourselves here in the United States and we do not believe that that PKI chip can be compromised. And as I mentioned earlier, if someone tries to read the chip, they can’t get it because the book is closed in the anti-skimming list.

MR. MCCORMACK: And then also these two things have to be – this has to line up --

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: That’s right.

MR. MCCORMACK: -- with the chip in the back.

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: The chip has to line up with the data on the information page.

MR. MCCORMACK: Okay. Ambassador Kennedy, thanks so much for talking about your American passport.

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: Thanks, Sean.

MR. MCCORMACK: Thank you.

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