#biometric-passport

#biometric-passport

The public Quizlet set contained information about alleged codes for specific facility entrances. 'Checkpoint doors code?' asked one card, with a specific four-digit combination listed in response.

At this stage of development, it is not possible to definitively estimate the cost to government from developing and running the digital ID system, adding that yet-to-be-taken policy decisions will materially impact the costs involved.

However, the government bans British citizens, including those with another nationality, from ETAs, meaning they either need to apply for a British passport if they don't have one or spend £589 on a certificate of entitlement. Both options take several weeks.

Never feel that you are totally safe. In July 2025, one company learned the hard way after an AI coding assistant it dearly trusted from Replit ended up breaching a "code freeze" and implemented a command that ended up deleting its entire product database. This was a huge blow to the staff. It effectively meant that months of extremely hard work, comprising 1,200 executive records and 1,196 company records, ended up going away.

What I walked through wasn't just an immigration gate. It was a node in a rapidly expanding global infrastructure of digital identity, one being constructed at extraordinary speed, across dozens of countries, by a mix of governments, multilateral organizations, and private technology vendors. The people building it believe they are solving real problems: fraud, statelessness, inefficient public services, financial exclusion.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will expand a touchless identification process for members of its TSA PreCheck program during airport screening to dozens of new airports this year. The TSA PreCheck Touchless ID line has been popping up at large airports across the country and is currently available at 20 different locations. But this year, the agency confirmed to Travel + Leisure it will expand the program to 45 new airports from Boston to San Diego and beyond.

Cell-site simulators ICE has a technology known as cell-site simulators to snoop on cellphones. These surveillance devices, as the name suggests, are designed to appear as a cellphone tower, tricking nearby phones to connect to them. Once that happens, the law enforcement authorities who are using the cell-site simulators can locate and identify the phones in their vicinity, and potentially intercept calls, text messages, and internet traffic.

Mobile Fortify, now used by United States immigration agents in towns and cities across the US, is not designed to reliably identify people in the streets and was deployed without the scrutiny that has historically governed the rollout of technologies that impact people's privacy, according to records reviewed by WIRED. The Department of Homeland Security launched Mobile Fortify in the spring of 2025 to "determine or verify" the identities of individuals stopped or detained by DHS officers during federal operations, records show.

Microsoft's BitLocker is a security feature built into Windows that encrypts the entire hard drive. The idea is to protect your personal files from prying eyes in case your PC is ever lost or stolen. Decrypting the data requires a BitLocker recovery key, which is supposed to be safe from access by other people. Aah, but not so fast. Microsoft has confirmed to Forbes that it will provide your BitLocker recovery key if it receives a valid legal order.

An FBI informant helped run the Incognito dark web market and allegedly approved the sale of fentanyl-laced pills, including those from a dealer linked to a confirmed death, WIRED reported this week. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Epstein's ties to Customs and Border Protection officers sparked a Department of Justice probe. Documents say that CBP officers in the US Virgin Islands were still friendly with Epstein years after his 2008 conviction, illustrating the infamous sex offender's tactics for cultivating allies.

According to reports, Meta is planning to add facial recognition to its artificial intelligence-powered sunglasses, as a means to enhance connection. Which is not overly surprising, given the added connectivity benefits this could provide for glasses wearers. But facial recognition has long been a sensitive area, with Meta shutting down its facial recognition processes on Facebook entirely in 2021, after user backlash around the automated detection of faces in images, particularly via photo tagging.