FYI: Mailed in my renewal in November, got it in December, no RFID. GF mailed her renewal in December, got it in January, no RFID.

I'm very relieved that my new passport, good till September 2016, is not an RFID version. I only have one Blink credit card, and after reading all the warnings I made an aluminum foil folder to carry it in. Apparently duct tape will block the radio waves, too: here's a a page about making a duct-tape wallet to protect your data:

http://www.rpi-polymath.com/ducttape/RFIDWallet.php

You could check here also http://www.difrwear.com/purchase.shtml

I didn't realize until reading that document that it sounds like the new passports apparently employ a sort of mini-Faraday cage themselves in order to make remote access more difficult. Looking at the state department website, they say the following: "To further protect against skimming, the U.S. e-passport will include a shielding material in the passport cover that will make unauthorized reading of the passport very difficult from any appreciable distance as long as the passport is closed."

Presumably they do this by embedding small wires in the passport cover. In other words, your passport may have its very "tin foil hat" already built in!

Anyone know more about this?

I had heard about this a while back, as it was being peddled by some DHS and State Department officials, but am still interested in independent test validations of that claim. The assertion is that as long as the passport is wholly or mostly closed it can't be read.

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There is a shield integrated into the document. Many people seem to overlook the Basic Access Control functionality built into the document as well. This technology works by encrypting the contents of the RFID chip, using various information from the machine readable zone on the data page as the key for the encryption scheme. Each key will be different, as each passport contains different personal information. Therefore, even if someone was able to skim information from the RFID chip, they would have no way to decrypt it without having physical access to the biodata page.

At a port of entry, the official will swipe the biodata page through their reader, and at the same time query the RFID chip using the information from the biodata page as the key. The built-in skimming shield, along with Basic Access Control seems to be a very robust solution to the concerns raised about remote skimming of passport biodata.

Another poster asked if "Department of State" was listed as issuing authority on all type P, D, and O documents. If you're referring to diplomatic, official, and regular passports, than the answer is yes. The type codes you used are internal though - the letter P appears in the document type field on the biodata pages of all U.S. passport types, as required by the ICAO specification. I'm not familiar with the type E that you mentioned. Did you mean Emergency Passports? Those have been updated as well.