Got an e-Passport? Grab a Hammer!
Wired Magazine's Jenna Wortham looks at the arrival on January 1st of RFID-enabled passports in the U.S. — and warns that "tampering with a passport is punishable by 25 years in prison"…
Putting the passport in the washing machine, or nuking it in your microwave, Wortham says, won't work. "The best approach? Hammer time," she writes. "Hitting the chip with a blunt, hard object should disable it. A nonworking RFID doesn't invalidate the passport, so you can still use it."
Still, there can be disadvantages to this approach — as JusticeISaid points out at Slashdot, "Great idea! Anything else I can do to slow down my passage through immigration and Customs after a long flight? I'm always looking for ideas."
If you want a compromise between passport destruction and immigration efficiency, The Inquirer's Nick Farrell suggests, "you could just do what we have been suggesting for months and wrap your passport in tin foil."