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This is not how the world already works.

If CBP's systems go down, they will not process (foreign, they'll process US citizens still) arrivals [1], even with physical passports in front of them. I assume the EU ESS works the same.

"If the internet goes down, your border checkpoint is down" is not some terrifying future we need to protect against, it's the reality of the world as you live in right now.

[1]: I've had to wait for an hour, at SFO of all places, because of exactly that happening.

by fc417fc8023 hours ago|

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TBF given that a temporary outage is abnormal it makes a certain amount of sense to default to shutting down. Whereas during an extended outage you can pick back up as long as the key parts of your system are capable of operating without the network.

by petu5 hours ago|

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> Relying upon the Internet being there for ID purposes is a massive fail.

Why would you need internet? Document holder smartphone can cache the document for years and present it over NFC (including photo, signature, etc). Just like existing biometric passports work, but replace the physical passport with smartphone app.

by klausa5 hours ago|

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To check against $your-local-law-enforcement-agency database, $your-local-immigration-agency for history of entry, etc.

The internet requirement is not there for the person presenting the document, it's for the person/system checking it.

by petu5 hours ago|

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System checking it just verifies the signature is valid and thus all data presented is valid? Your browser doesn't need to query any Root CAs to trust SSL certificate, https works without internet.

History of entry and visas/etc could be stored on device as well

by klausa5 hours ago|

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If you want to argue for a theoretical system that is self-contained, only relies on the data that is present on either the physical (or the theoretical cryptographically signed digital) passport, you're free to do that.

But in the real world, the systems that deal with processing people's entries already cross-reference multiple other existing databases, require internet connectivity to do so, and I think you'll have hard time convincing anyone to stop doing that.