What is a biometric passport?
Given that all ICAO-compliant passports provide a photograph of the passport-holder’s face, in its broadest sense, all passports are effectively biometric passports. Recently, US legislators have adopted the term “biometric passport” to denote a machine readable travel document that features a photograph that has been printed to the data page (rather than using a separate photograph that is pasted onto the page). Printed photographs offer a higher level of security by inhibiting fraud through photo substitution. In this context, “biometric passports” are simply interim precursors to ePassports.
