The US House of Representatives voted to delay for one year the deadline for 27 countries to provide their citizens with tamper-proof passports that can be read by machine.
The voice vote Monday responds to complaints, mostly from European nations with visa waiver agreements with the US, that they will be unable to meet the Oct. 26 deadline for issuing the new biometric passports.
It also challenges administrative assertions that other countries need an extra two years to overcome technology problems and resolve privacy questions.
Secretary of State Colin Powell and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said in March that without a two-year extension, millions of new visas would have to be issued in countries whose citizens currently do not need visas to visit the US. They said US consular offices in the affected countries would be overwhelmed.
On the US side, State Department consular affairs spokesman Stuart Patt said last month that technical standards are being developed for the passports and the machines that can read them. He said biometric US passports are not likely to be ready until the end of next year.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, the bill's sponsor, said many countries under the visa waiver program, such as Belgium, are making significant progress toward biometric passports. He said Austria, Denmark and Slovenia have developed working prototypes.
Congress voted in 2002 to require the biometric passports that will enable officials to match a person's unique characteristics with the digital image in the passports or travel documents.
Sensenbrenner said more than 10 million visitors enter the US every year from countries participating in the visa waiver program, established with nations whose citizens were thought to pose little security threat or risk of overstaying the 90-day limit.
The program has come under reconsideration since the Sept. 11 attacks and the recognition that terrorists could use the passports of visa waiver countries, sometimes counterfeited, to gain access to the US.
In April, the government announced that a program that would require foreigners to be fingerprinted and photographed before entering this country would be expanded to include visitors from the 27 countries. Those changes will take effect Sept. 30.
Twenty-two of the visa waiver countries are in Europe. The others are Australia, Brunei, Japan, New Zealand and Singapore.
The bill must still be taken up by the Senate.
Also, the US is days away from launching a scheme that would create an elite class of airline traveller entitled to bypass long queues for security checks at American airports, it emerged Monday.
Frequent flyers wishing to join the registered traveller program will pay a one-off fee, understood to be about US$100, and undergo extensive background checks in return for a faster journey to their departure gate.
Members will carry a card containing biometric data, and will probably avoid having to remove coats and shoes, as well being exempt from pat-down searches.
One supporter of the scheme, David Stempler of the Air Travelers Association, said members would even be allowed to use security channels usually reserved for flight crew and airport employees.
A spokeswoman for the transportation security authority, part of the department for homeland security, said that a pilot version would be running by July. An official announcement this week is expected to name Minneapolis-St. Paul airport in Minnesota as the first location for the trial.
"We need to get away from treating the travelling public as if all of them are equally liable to have terroristic tendencies and concentrate on folks we don't know much about," Tim Anderson, Minneapolis-St. Paul's deputy director of operations, said.
Many business travelers relish the idea -- according to one poll, almost three-quarters would be happy to pay US$100 to cut waiting times.
But civil liberties campaigners argue that there will be disadvantages for everyone: Those who do not join could be subjected to more intrusive searches, while those who give the government permission to access their backgrounds would not be able to guarantee the data would not be abused.
"We're not convinced the information will remain restricted -- the history of mission creep in the US is long and sordid," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union.
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