Fingerprint passport deferred
By Lara Jakes Jordan
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is putting off plans that could have required visitors from friendly nations, including Japan, to show passports with fingerprint and iris scan information by this fall.
Instead, foreigners from 27 counties currently not required to apply for U.S. visas will only need to carry passports with tamperproof digitized photos by Oct. 26, administration and congressional officials said yesterday.
Hawai'i's tourism industry welcomed the news.
"You don't want to hassle the Japanese visitors who come to Hawai'i to have a good time," said Paul Kosasa, president of ABC Stores, which operates 36 convenience stores in Waikiki.
Japanese made up about 21 percent of all visitors to Hawai'i last year. Arrivals from Japan were up last year for the first time since 1997, with 1.48 million tourists visiting the Islands, a 10.3 percent increase over the previous year.
The Homeland Security Department will require passports to include an embedded chip to hold future biometric information such as fingerprints and iris scans as early as next year.
The new standards, which represent a step back from what the U.S. initially envisioned for biometric passports, could be announced as early as today, when Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff visits Sheffield, England. In a speech last month in Brussels, Chertoff affirmed Homeland Security's commitment to biometrics as a high-tech approach to security screening "compatible on both sides of the Atlantic."
The expanded biometric proposals were controversial among the visa-waiver nations — mostly from Europe — that balked at additional costs and privacy concerns the high-tech documents would incur. They also note that the U.S. has not agreed to require fingerprint or iris scan data in its own passports.
Ireland, for example, began issuing passports in December with digitized photographs but is not prepared to include the biometric chip, said Joe Hackett, spokesman for the Irish Embassy in Washington.
"We will be ready to move when the time is right," Hackett said. "This new Irish passport may be accepted as meeting the requirements for continued participation in the visa-waiver program — certainly at least in the short term."
A Homeland Security Department official said yesterday that the government felt the new standards were as strict as the U.S. could require at the moment. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the standards have not yet been announced, said Homeland Security still plans to require expanded biometric data in passports in the future.
The new rules allow the 27 nations to comply with a 2002 law requiring them to issue tamperproof passports that carry biometric identification data in line U.N. passport guidelines. Those guidelines specify digital photos with high-tech facial recognition abilities in passports but do not require fingerprint or iris scan data.
Initially, the visa-waiver counties were supposed to comply with the U.S. biometric standards by last October. But they failed to meet that deadline, in part because of confusion over how wide-reaching the standards should be. But without the new standards, which are similar to the U.N. guidelines, many of the visa-waiver nations probably would miss the deadline again.
Officials said the compromise was largely brokered by House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., who has pushed for clarification of the biometric requirements to prevent a chilling effect on U.S. tourism and commerce while maintaining safe borders.
In an April 7 letter, Sensenbrenner told European Commission officials that "much expense and public consternation could have been avoided by a less technically ambitious approach, one that simply met the terms of the (U.S.) act as written."
Advertiser staff writer Rick Daysog contributed to this report.
