As ITIF wrote at this time last year in Explaining International Leadership in Contactless Mobile Payments, near-field communications (NFC) technology is a form of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology that works over very short distances to enable "contactless" secure financial transactions or exchange of identification information via mobile devices. The report noted how NFC technology is used extensively in Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and China in mass...

RFID privacy concerns have made news again. The Associated Press reported on a video of a security consultant in California filming himself reading the identifiers off of the new U.S. passport cards (PASS cards). As I’ve previously argued, most of these claims about RFID are bogus. Even in this most recent example, what did the self-described “hacker” really learn while driving around? A passport containing the unique identifier X was at location Y at time Z. That’s all. Even assuming there was...