BY MICHAEL KAWA, Contributing Editor Electronic Products
After spending the day in Canada recently, I headed back to the United States through my local border crossing. At the entry gate, and before looking at my ID, the border patrol agent surprisingly greeted me by name. He then took my ID, gave it a quick glance and asked me some basic security questions before letting me go on my way.
While the crossing appeared mostly routine, it was not. This had been my first opportunity to use an enhanced driver’s license (EDL) as a cross-border travel document. My new state-issued EDL contains an embedded radio frequency identification (RFID) tag, which stores a unique reference number specifically assigned to me.
As I approached the border gate, the tag number was read remotely by an RFID reader and used to retrieve my corresponding records from a secured EDL database. Before I pulled up to the agent’s window, my personal information, photograph, and tag travel history were already being displayed on the agent’s security console for processing and review.
This early identification system is just one application of RFID technology…
Read the full article at Electronicproducts.com