What do you think passports will look like in 20-30 years?

My guess is that the booklet passport will quickly become obsolete as more and more countries switch to electronic visas. Now that records of who has been granted a visa are kept in a computer that can be accessed at the checkpoint, there is no real need for paper visas or entry/exit stamps anymore, and as countries switch to electronic visas, passengers will no longer need passport booklets. I would say that by 2040, most countries will issue passports in card format only, with a special booklet available upon request for people traveling to the few remaining countries that still issue paper visas.

What do you all think?

It will be a RFID chip planted in your neck - so they don't have to look at the passport but will know where you are.

Or just use iris scanners like in Minority Report which are a little harder to forge. Big Brother and the New World Order will be able to keep tabs on your every movement. Think of it like the TSA meets the Stasi and on steroids.

There already is the passport card and border crossing card for use in North America. Something like this might happen sooner between the US and visa waiver countries in Europe and parts of Asia, but I think it'll take a much longer time than you think for the "few remaining countries" (more like most remaining countries) to go off the paper system.

So I think paper booklets aren't endangered in the next couple decades, although they might get smaller and smaller (but with the Schengen states starting to stamp a hell of a lot more often a couple years ago, this is going to require paper real estate so long as it lasts).

I'm with puddinhead though ... I don't have a RFID passport yet, but my pre-chip passport will expire soon. As soon as the new one arrives, I plan to nuke its chip.

the passport is a universal document for people traveling. Exchange money? In some areas you need to show your passport. Check into a hotel? Show a passport. That part of it is not going away any time soon, there will still be some need for some documentation for those small places. I think the move to an all electronic system will be about as fast as the US adoption of chip and pin credit cards, and that's been years and years.

The few hotels/motels/worse I've stayed at in the ROK never asked for a passport. Definitely the exception, but I'll be damned if checking-in didn't take ten seconds.

As part of training for a past job, I happen to have had the opportunity to learn a fair bit about the inner workings of IC chipped passports.

I can understand the skepticism - I'm a serious civil libertarian and approached electronic passports with a very, very wary predisposition. But I came away legitimately impressed.

Electronic passports are a global standard centered around Near Field Communication technology (NFC for short; the governing standard is ISO 14443). This is actually different than what's properly called RFID. RFID tags are designed to be read from a distance and are often one or more of cheap/simple/insecure.

NFC, on the other hand, is based around the same proven technology as physical smart cards. Actually, the protocol is exactly the same ISO standard, just wireless instead of wired. (If your work badge has gold contacts on it and you insert it into a reader, it's almost certainly an ISO 7816 smart card. EMV credit cards, commonly known as "chip and pin", are also based on 7816.)

NFC also requires very close proximity to a reader to work - one key difference from RFID is that in normal conditions, intentionality is required to read a tag. Think of NFC credit cards - in fact, you might even have some in your wallet, with names like ExpressPay, Blink, or PayPass. These broadly use the same underlying technology as an e-passport; you need to tap them very closely and intentionally on a reader before a transaction is completed.

Now that you understand the radio layer, let's talk about how the data in an NFC passport is stored. The chip in the passport is a very basic smart card that contains a copy of the data page and your photo - basically, a duplicate of the information that's physically printed on the passport. An iris scan or a fingerprint scan can optionally be included; some countries (like the US and UK) do not currently include this, while others (like the Schengen countries) include two or more fingerprints.

It also contains a digital signature from the issuer of the passport using industry standard public key cryptography (basically the same technology that powers HTTPS secure transactions on the web - if you've seen your browser's address bar show the name of a store you're shopping at in green, it's a broadly similar concept).

This provides a difficult to counterfeit copy of the data on a passport - it's difficult to create the IC chip in the first place, and furthermore it's extremely difficult (bordering on impossible with normal amounts of computing power) to forge the electronic signature of the passport issuing agency. This provides a border agent with a very high degree of confidence that your document is authentic and that the data page on your passport is unaltered.

One common concern when IC passports were first announced was that they might be read remotely and unintentionally with a Really Big Antenna (TM). It's a valid concern, and it was taken into account with the design of the e-passports by providing a number of optional security measures that many countries use. First, the covers can contain wire mesh woven in, acting as a Faraday Cage and blocking any signal from going through. (Same principle as why your phone often doesn't work inside steel office buildings.)

Even that wasn't considered enough, though, so an additional optional layer of security was provided. The contents of the passport chip are encrypted, and the encryption key is actually the text in the Machine Readable Zone (MRZ) on the data page of your passport. This means that even if you could manage to establish a connection with the chip in a passport remotely, you would need to possess a copy of the inside of the passport to do anything with that connection. This is, coincidentally, why border agents always open your passport and press the data page down on an optical reader, even if you have an IC chip enabled passport - both the data zone AND the chip are necessary to validate the document. This is known as "Basic Access Control".

Like any engineered system, this isn't perfect. For example, each country tends to choose one or two vendors for the chips that go in these passports, and those chips are designed similarly; that means that the way chips respond to incorrect communication can be used to determine the origin country of a passport. Wikipedia lists a few more attacks. But by and large, the system is very well designed and is pretty transparent.

If you're curious, you can find out more from ICAO 9303. ICAO is part of the UN and is one of the organizations that sets various standards related to air travel, and they designed and maintain the biometric passport standard.

Now, circling back to the original question... in the medium term, I can easily see visa/entry/exit stamp pages being scaled back or removed entirely in favor of electronic storage in the passport's IC chip and a thinner passport "folder". I don't know if the existing standard includes support for that, but I do know it wouldn't be difficult to add (although it would raise passport costs.) I do suspect the machine readable data page isn't going anywhere due to the basic authentication standard.

We may also see other form factors appear. One likely alternative is a plastic credit card sized passport, especially since some countries already issue national identity cards that use the same ICAO 9303 standard for their embedded NFC chips. (Despite the name, the US passport card is not one of these documents.)

In the long term, I think the eventuality will be storage of secure passport credentials in your mobile phone. Many devices (most notably, many new Android phones) have the ability to securely store multiple credentials in their embedded NFC chip. I doubt this will ever replace a passport for general purpose travel, but it's easy to imagine this being used for a trusted border crossing program between two close allies for frequent travelers (think NEXUS between the US/Canada as an example).