Despite increasing opposition to the introduction of Labour’s police state I.D. cards, the Government is still pressing ahead with its plans to remove the freedom of all British subjects, and to treat them as tagged criminals by forcing these cards upon them. An integral part of introducing this appalling plan is to force I.D. cards upon all who wish to purchase a passport, which will include an I.D. card chip with intimate details of the passport holder. The Government has declared that these cards, which will intrude into peoples lives in many ways, will be secure. The Chancellor, Gordon Brown, who is hoping to take over from Tony Blair, when he either resigns or is booted out by his own Labour colleagues, has declared his support for making I.D. cards even more intrusive and draconian. He also wants to sell intimate I.D. details to banks and other organisations, whilst charging the people for the privilege of having an I.D. card or passport they do not want, added to which an additional charge will be made when people update their cards when they move house or change other details, which they will be forced to do under the threat of massive fines. All new passports are being fitted with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags which contain the holders details. It has recently been revealed that these RFID tags can easily be cloned with the use of laptop equipment, a $200 RFID reader and an inexpensive smart card writer. At a recent conference, Lukas Grunwald, a researcher with DN-Systems in Hildesheim, Germany, demonstrated that he could copy data stored in an RFID tag from his passport and write the data on to a smart card equipped with an RFID chip. The copied chip could be used in a forged passport, for example. "We programmed the chip to behave like a passport," Grunwald said Data leakage is one of those dangers. By design, RFID tags can be read by readers. In their current design, a slightly opened passport would be detectable, said Kevin Mahaffey, a researcher with wireless security company Flexilis. Although the actual data on the chip can't be read, "the simple ability for an attacker to know that someone is carrying a passport is a dangerous security breach", he said. It may be possible to determine the nationality of a passport holder by "fingerprinting" the characteristics of the RFID chip, Mahaffey said. "Taken to an extreme, this could make it possible to craft explosives that detonate only when someone from the US is nearby," he said. Mahaffey showed a video that simulates just that. Many people who have taken up the No2ID initiative and renewed their passports early to avoid the compulsory I.D. passports, have found their new passports have been fitted with the RFID tags which have a copy of their photograph and signature embedded in them. Some campaigners have made the suggestion that these passports should be microwaved to incapacitate the RFID, although it is not clear what will happen if they cannot be read.