Neville Pattinson protects passport privacy

Neville Pattinson protects passport privacy

The Allied sky watchers who used RF technology to identify aircraft as friend or foe back in World War II understood its value for intelligence gathering. Today, RF identification tags have opened the door to powerful market analytics and supply chain management capabilities, potentially enabling automatic identification and tracking of just about anything distributed, sold and used.

When the technology was first pitched as a replacement for bar codes, mass retailers like Walmart eagerly got on board. An RFID tag could store information electronically. It didn’t require line of sight for a reader to read its data. It could be embedded in the tracked object. What wasn’t to like?

But at the turn of the millennium, as added intelligence on the RFID chip microcontroller expanded the chips’ application range beyond mere inventory tracking, the technology’s capabilities and the potential for abuse raised red flags. Privacy advocates wondered how vulnerable the tags would be to data skimming by third parties. Government proposals for an RFID-based e-passport system only multiplied privacy advocates’ concerns.

The engineering community understood the technology’s implications, as well as the ability to protect users’ privacy though secure protocols and other mechanisms. But government officials eager to use RFID to expedite border security were reluctant to ponder unintended consequences.

In a post-9/11 environment where “security” often trumped “privacy,” one stubborn EE forced the government to confront the flaws in its proposed e-passport system, ultimately helping to convince federal officials to beef up e-passport security mechanisms. Neville Pattinson’s tenacity, integrity and independent thinking helped save U.S. citizens from a potential privacy nightmare.


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Neville Pattinson

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