Originally Posted by
Mark in CA
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) issues passport standards which are treated as recommendations to national governments. The size of passports normally comply with ISO/IEC 7810 ID-3 standard, which specifies a size of 125 × 88 mm (4.921 × 3.465 in). This size is the B7 format.
Machine-readable passport standards have been issued by the ICAO, with an area set aside where most of the information written as text is also printed in a manner suitable for optical character recognition.
Biometric passports (or e-Passports) have an embedded contactless smart card chip in order to conform to ICAO standards. The chips contain data about the passport holder, a photograph in digital format and data about the passport itself.
The trouble with biometric passports is that all you need is someone who looks more or less like you. As the poster said, at airline ticket desks and exit points on immigration passports are not checked as carefully as entry points. Fake passports aren't usually needed to blow up or hijack a plane. Regular passports work well enough, unless the holder is on a no-fly list.
And, if you did need a fake passport, choosing a recently stolen one would seem a better choice.