Russia to switch to new foreign travel passports by year's end (Biometric)

[The Straight Story]

Russia to switch to new foreign travel passports by year's end

21:28
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MOSCOW, June 2 (RIA Novosti) - New patterns for foreign travel passports will appear in Russia by the year's end, to be introduced into mass circulation in 2007, Arkadi Trachuk, the general director of the Russian Finance Ministry's Goznak printing enterprise, said.

New passports will offer information about their bearers in a thoroughly new way, with microcircuits containing data on the bearer's identity and biometric parameters.

To all appearances, it will be a photograph plus two fingerprints, though a final decision on that score is still to be made. Photographs will no longer be glued on passports to give way to laser engraving, Trachuk added.

Total Russian expenditures on passport changes are roughly estimated at $20 billion, he said.

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20050602/40463630.html

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Hmmmmm.... my tin foil hat is flashing.