Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're totally right, the paper passport could be considered a strange object in a very electronic world. However, in my experience, truly electronically equipped borders are the edge case. The countries that take e-passports without any agent interaction are fee and far between, and typically only service citizens of that country. Perhaps you're fortunate enough to travel in a selection of bleeding edge countries, v…
> For an electronic system to work, you'd need 100% coverage of every border, or the system breaks - and that's hard to pull off. And therein lies the true absurdity of it. All travel stops if the internet goes down?
Obviously I say "if" because those who actually want to deceive the system walk through borders by foot (taking advantage of the terrain), and register as migrants (under no less than 14 identities for one person - that's what happened for the last terrorist in Europe). Heightened passport security rules are great, but they mostly catch citizen who thought they were law-abiding, while it's much, much harder to deal with real criminality.
