On Wednes­day, Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Jack Warn­er an­nounced that T&T would be mov­ing to adopt e-pass­ports-trav­el doc­u­ments that em­bed bio­met­ric in­for­ma­tion as an en­hanced se­cu­ri­ty mea­sure. Mr Warn­er was speak­ing at the launch of the sub-re­gion­al work­shop on ca­pac­i­ty build­ing in Trav­el Doc­u­ment Se­cu­ri­ty and Iden­ti­ty Man­age­ment, and his an­nounce­ment must have been a mar­quee item at that dis­cus­sion.

The Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter not­ed that all coun­tries have been man­dat­ed by the In­ter­na­tion­al Civ­il Avi­a­tion Or­gan­i­sa­tion to adopt the stan­dard by 2017 and this coun­try plans to be­gin its roll-out with diplo­mats and gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials in 2015. Bel­gium in­tro­duced bio­met­ric pass­ports in 2004 and In­dia be­gan its pro­gramme in 2008 by is­su­ing the first such doc­u­ment to its Pres­i­dent, Prat­i­b­ha Patil, with cit­i­zens to fol­low in 2013.

A bio­met­ric pass­port stores dig­i­tal im­age files cap­tur­ing unique fea­tures of its bear­er, en­abling dig­i­tal com­par­i­son tech­nolo­gies to com­pare stored da­ta with those of the per­son hold­ing it. These pass­ports store da­ta for fa­cial recog­ni­tion, fin­ger­print recog­ni­tion, and iris recog­ni­tion on a mi­crochip with just 64 kilo­bytes of stor­age.

The de­sign and adop­tion of bio­met­ric pass­ports has been dri­ven by height­ened se­cu­ri­ty con­cerns since 9/11, but the tech­nol­o­gy has al­so raised con­cerns about po­ten­tial civ­il rights in­fringe­ments that may arise with the re­ten­tion of such defin­ing iden­ti­fy­ing in­for­ma­tion. The se­cu­ri­ty mea­sures built in­to these pass­ports to pro­tect this in­for­ma­tion from be­ing ex­ploit­ed by dig­i­tal thieves con­tin­ues to be cross-ex­am­ined.

Mr Warn­er was keen to note that with bio­met­ric pass­ports, trav­el­ling should be­come eas­i­er with many air­ports in­tro­duc­ing smart gates that would use the in­for­ma­tion on these new trav­el doc­u­ments to speed ver­i­fi­ca­tion at ports of en­try. There was no word, how­ev­er, on whether the in­tro­duc­tion of these so­phis­ti­cat­ed tech­nolo­gies would im­prove the slow pace of pass­port pro­cess­ing in T&T.

In June, the T&T Guardian re­port­ed on the gap be­tween the time it takes to pro­duce to­day's ma­chine-read­able pass­ports, said to be three to four days for a re­new­al and sev­en to ten days on first is­sue, but in­ter­nal bu­reau­cra­cy stretch­es that time for per­sons hop­ing to get a pass­port to months.

While this is a clear im­prove­ment on the Im­mi­gra­tion Di­vi­sion's first in­tro­duc­tion of ma­chine read­able pass­ports, when re­new­ing or re­quest­ing a pass­port was an ad­ven­ture that could take years, there's clear­ly room for im­prove­ment. The new bio­met­ric pass­ports are an op­por­tu­ni­ty to im­ple­ment sig­nif­i­cant up­grades in both tech­nol­o­gy im­ple­men­ta­tion at the Im­mi­gra­tion Di­vi­sion and the at­ten­dant bu­reau­crat­ic sys­tems to avoid a re­peat of those de­lays.

These up­grades might al­so pave the way for im­prove­ments to the na­tion­al ID card sys­tem, which should al­so be mov­ing to the elec­tron­ic ID card stan­dard, which al­so us­es a mi­crochip to store dig­i­tal sig­na­ture keys and cer­tifi­cates that iden­ti­fy cit­i­zens. Such a card lu­bri­cates not on­ly day to day trans­ac­tions for which an ID card might be of­fered, but will be in­creas­ing­ly im­por­tant for the dig­i­tal trans­ac­tions that will rep­re­sent the da­ta gov­erned fu­ture.

T&T may not be quite ready for an elec­tron­ic ID card, but this is ex­act­ly when the coun­try should be prepar­ing for a fu­ture that's go­ing to ar­rive soon­er than any­one might imag­ine. It's a very short step from use­ful to op­tion­al to re­quired, and the world is clear­ly mov­ing to elec­tron­ic iden­ti­ty ver­i­fi­ca­tion sys­tems.

It's tak­en far too long for leg­is­la­tion to sup­port these cru­cial ad­vances and now that laws un­der the Da­ta Pro­tec­tion Act have par­tial­ly brought in­to force via Le­gal No­tice No 2 of 2012, the ground­work has been laid for press­ing for­ward briskly on with these changes. Trinidad and To­ba­go must en­sure that it re­mains in step, at the very least, with these crit­i­cal changes in iden­ti­ty ver­i­fi­ca­tion that will in­creas­ing­ly de­fine how ef­fec­tive­ly cit­i­zens will in­ter­act with the glob­al com­mu­ni­ty.