U.S. delays imposing stricter passport rules

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is putting off plans that could have required visitors from friendly nations to show passports with fingerprint and iris-scan information by this fall.

Instead, foreigners from 27 countries currently not required to apply for U.S. visas will only need to carry passports with tamper-proof digitized photos by Oct. 26, administration and congressional officials said yesterday.

European nations applauded the decision shelving the stricter passport standards, which will help the visa-waiver countries comply with laws tightening U.S. borders after the 2001 attacks. The countries failed to meet an October 2004 deadline requiring passports with extensive biometric information, and many were expected to miss it again this year.

However, the Homeland Security Department will require passports to include an embedded chip as early as next year. It will hold future biometric information such as fingerprints and iris scans.

The new standards, which represent a step back from what the United States initially envisioned for biometric passports, could be announced as early as today, when Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff visits Sheffield, England. In a speech last month in Brussels, Belgium, Chertoff affirmed the department's commitment to biometrics as a high-tech approach to security screening "compatible on both sides of the Atlantic."

The expanded biometric proposals were controversial among the visa-waiver nations, most of them European, which balked at additional costs and privacy concerns the high-tech documents would incur. They also note the United States has not agreed to require fingerprint or iris scan-data in its own passports.

Ireland, for example, began issuing passports in December with digitized photographs but is not prepared to include the biometric chip, said Joe Hackett, spokesman for the Irish Embassy in Washington, D.C.

A Homeland Security Department official said yesterday the government thought the new standards were as strict as the U.S. could require at the moment. The official, who requested anonymity because the standards have not yet been announced, said Homeland Security still plans to require expanded biometric data in passports in the future.

The new rules allow the 27 nations to comply with a 2002 law requiring them to issue tamper-proof passports that carry biometric identification data in line with U.N. passport guidelines. Those guidelines specify digital photos with high-tech facial-recognition abilities in passports but do not require fingerprint or iris-scan data.

Initially, the visa-waiver countries were supposed to comply with the U.S. biometric standards by last October. But they failed to meet that deadline, in part because of confusion over how wide-reaching the standards should be. At that time, U.S. officials agreed to extend the compliance deadline by one year.

But without the new standards, which are similar to the U.N. guidelines, many of the visa-waiver nations probably would miss the deadline again.

Officials said the compromise was largely brokered by House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., who has pushed for clarification of the biometric requirements to prevent a chilling effect on U.S. tourism and commerce while maintaining safe borders.

In an April 7 letter, Sensenbrenner told top European Commission officials that "much expense and public consternation could have been avoided by a less technically ambitious approach, one that simply met the terms of the [U.S.] act as written."