New RP passport not tamper-proof?

MANILA, Philippines – The government’s system in issuing the new “machine readable” passports (MRPs) is reportedly vulnerable to falsification and does not comply with international standards for the issuance of machine readable travel documents set by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

Sources in the highly technological printing industry told The STAR that due to the poor quality of security features in the new “machine readable” passports, a group that has access to sophisticated printing equipment could easily reproduce a fake MRP that could avoid detection by authorities.

Worse, sources said, is that the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) and the Bureau of Immigration’s (BI) lack of a secure database makes it easier for unscrupulous groups to come out with fake MRPs and use these to engage in international human smuggling that could involve illegal workers or terrorists, without being detected.

A secure database for issued international machine readable travel documents has been named as an international standard by the ICAO, the specialized agency formed by the United Nations to be a virtual global civil aviation security and safety watchdog.

The new MRPs being issued by the DFA reportedly depend on the “machine readable zones” with bar coded numbers on the main pages of the new passports that carry the photograph and personal details of the passport holder.

In the DFA’s MRP system, immigration counters at the airport would have machines that would read the machine readable zones of the passports and scan the bar codes from which the automatic encoding of a passenger’s passport information into the BI database and a subsequent or simultaneous passport authenticity check would be made.

Because of the lack of a secure passport database for the BI and DFA that is interconnected in “real-time,” no real authentication is being made of the MRPs when they go through the machine reader, the sources said.

It was learned that the DFA tapped the services of a local printing firm, Hologram Industries, to produce the new machine readable Philippine passports.

The sources also said that the bar code and the laminated paper used by Hologram Industries where the MRPs are printed on could easily be obtained in the market and with knowledge on the latest printing technology, a fake machine readable passport could be reproduced.

To prove the ease in reproducing fake MRPs that could be read by machine readers, the sources provided The STAR with a fake MRP whose machine readable zone and bar code were subsequently read and verified by a BID machine reader at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) Terminal I earlier last week.

Ferdinand Sampol, head immigration supervisor at the NAIA, dismissed claims that the new MRPs could easily be tampered with, illegally reproduced or avoid detection by the BI at the airport as these have the latest security features.

Sampol, however, said that since the MRP is virtually tamper-proof, unscrupulous groups could opt for its complete reproduction.

But he stressed that any well-trained immigration examiner at the NAIA could spot a reproduced MRP at a glance.

“There could be complete reproduction. Still, if one will come under inspection, it would still be discovered,” Sampol assured.

He said that security features of the MRPs that would be hard to falsify are the security fibers, the wet official seals and holograms imprinted or embedded in the passport sheets.

Sampol also claimed that in his recent meetings with ICAO passport security experts, the Philippine MRPs were recognized, if not praised, for the quality of their security features.

“Definitely, it’s at par with the international standards of the ICAO,” Sampol said.

Sampol also denied that there was no database for the issued passports that were being used by the BI and the DFA for passport verification.

According to the BI-NAIA chief, the DFA provides the BI with a database of the passports they have issued to all holders from which immigration examiners verify the authenticity of a Philippine passport.

The Philippines started the MRP issuance system to comply with the ICAO mandatory requirement for all member-states to issue machine readable passports by 2010.

The issuance of these travel documents according to ICAO-MRTD standards and specifications allows for automated scanning of the machine readable zone, thus reducing errors that are caused by human data entry of information, and benefiting from security verification systems built in the issuance process.