Australia is looking at trialling passport-less travel in a move Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop predicts will go global.
The idea of cloud passports is the result of a hipster-style-hackathon held at the Department of Foreign Affairs, which culminated in an X-Factor style audition before the secretary Peter Varghese, Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop, Assistant Minister Steve Ciobo and Chris Vein from the World Bank.
Earlier this year the call was put out to the diplomatic corps in Canberra and the 110 missions around the world for any idea that would provide a radical rethink of business as usual.
More than half the department’s staff responded by submitting, or by voting or commenting on one of the 392 pitches to the “DFAT Ideas challenge”.
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The top 10 were presented to the quartet of judges, who favoured the idea of passport-less travel. Under a cloud passport, a traveller’s identity and biometrics data would be stored in a cloud, so passengers would no longer need to carry their passports and risk having them lost or stolen. DFAT says 38,718 passports were registered as lost or stolen in 2014-15, consistent with the 38,689 reported missing the previous year.
Read the full article at the SMH here:
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/australia-to-trial-cloud-passports-in-worldfirst-move-20151028-gkkkr3.html