High-tech passportry

I don’t understand this disabling the RFID chip in your passport meme, at all. What does a passport with the cryptographically-signed data missing look like? A forgery, that’s what.

But the article goes on to state that “a nonworking RFID doesn’t invalidate the passport, so you can still use it”. What? It seems to me that these new security measures, ostensibly intended to make forgeries more difficult, can be less than successful if they’re, you know, optional.

Well, never mind me then, I guess — go on and smash your passports to pieces. Here in Finland, though, that’s not a solution. There’s no workaround for the absolute worst feature of the new biometric passports (pictured above): all the identifying text on them is set in all-caps Verdana Bold.