A sideline question: In Jason Bourne movie there are a few shots showing the protagonist faking passports. Does such technique (looks like no advanced tools are used) exist or just a film fantasy?
Most rich countries now use passports with an RFID chip which contains a copy of all the data in the passport and a digital signature.
They also host a server allowing trusted third parties to verify that a given passport is still valid (ie. Not withdrawn).
The combination of those mean you will never edit details on a passport, but you might be able to copy a passport 1:1, because the security is only mifare classic.
Depending on the intended use, copying 1:1 is kinda "useless" as well, as the picture is also included in the RFID chip. Some of those "quick entry" machines many countries are apparently are doing face matching between the person standing there and the picture embedded in the RFID chip.
You can actually read the photo from your passport with an Android phone. Some of the info in the machine readable area is required as a salt, so you can't do a remote scan of a closed passport.
I think anyone needing "fake passports" usually gets them from stolen identities (or stealing a passport from someone similar looking) and getting a new one issued. Probably easier in countries that don't require the passport to be sent back for another one to be issued.
There's a fascinating snippet relating to this in the book Rise and Kill First by the Israeli national security journalist Ronen Bergman. Apparently faking passports could take months, at least in 2010 for the Mossad. Traditionally the Mossad would call off operations if they didn't have enough fake passports, but the new director decided to cut corners and reuse passports. This contributed to one of their most humiliating failures.
Busy spy crossroads such as Dubai, Jordan, India and many E.U. points of entry are employing iris scanners to link eyeballs irrevocably to a particular name. . . . For a clandestine field operative, flying under a false name could be a one-way ticket to a headquarters desk, since they’re irrevocably chained to whatever name and passport they used.
In a Tom Clancy book they talked about terrorists just buying the commercial equipment used to make ID's. On Silk Road, I remember some guy claiming to sell British passports genuinely made from within the UK government.
I bought a fake id 30 years ago that used the actual backs from Rhode Island DMV that they acquired somehow, but then faked the fronts. Equipment like that can absolutely go missing.
I used to make fake IDs that reused both the plastic backing and the hologram layer from a real license. I spent some time creating a template in Photoshop that I ink-jetted onto photo paper. The final result was very close to the real thing in all aspects: look, thickness, weight, “bendyness”, real hologram, and light transmission (i.e. the bouncer shining a flashlight through the back of the ID would see what he expected to see. A bit of translucency)
I never got around to modifying the data on mag stripe. I just dragged a hard-drive magnet over it until it didn’t scan at all.
My takeaway from all that? The hologram that was used to strengthen the official IDs had an unintended side effect of making the fakes easier to believe.
Depends on the security features of the passport. Most modern passports are highly secure. A 1960s passport from an African country would have lacked security features and been much simpler to fake or modify.
