to the passports. There are established ways of making forged fingerprints. In the future, the authorities would like to have automated border controls, and such forged fingerprints [stuck on to fingers] would probably fool them." But what about facial recognition systems (your biometric passport contains precise measurements of key points on your face and head)? "Yes," says Grunwald, "but they are not yet in operation at airports and the technology throws up between 20 and 25% false negatives or false positives. It isn't reliable." Neither is the human eye, according to research conducted by a team of psychologists from the University of Westminster in 1996. Remember, information - such as a new picture - cannot be added to a cloned chip, so anyone using it to make a counterfeit passport would have to use one that bore a reasonable resemblance to themselves. But during Westminster University's study, which examined whether putting people's images on credit cards might reduce fraud, supermarket staff drafted in for tests had great difficulty matching faces to pictures. The conclusion was that pictures would not improve security and they were never introduced on credit cards. This means that each time you hand over your passport at, say, a hotel reception or car-rental office abroad to be "photocopied", it could be cloned with equipment like ours. This could have been done with an old passport, but since the new biometric passports are supposed to be secure they are more likely to be accepted without question at borders.