On Capitol Hill, proposals to extend the timeline lawmakers originally wrote for the changes were passed last week after drafts circulated of a highly critical assessment of progress on the issue written by the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm.

But the legislation passed as part of the Senate's huge immigration and border reform bill also reflects broadening unease among lawmakers about the impact of the changes on the economy of the northern border region, and about the privacy implications of the new technology needed to make the tighter rules work.

The plan for stricter rules on identity documents at the northern border is part of the so-called Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. It was originally legislated by Congress in 2004 in response to the Sept. 11 Commission, which said there was a significant security vulnerability inherent in the current border regime, which basically allows U.S. and Canadian citizens to cross with little more than a driver's license by way of identification.

The initiative mandated the introduction of a requirement for passports or, in the somewhat indefinite language of the statute, some other kind of acceptable secure identification that establishes citizenship, by Jan. 1, 2008.

But the ideal of a seamless, biometric frontier has bumped up against the reality of complex questions about what kind of identification documents are politically acceptable and technically practicable; and about how to maintain the frictionless transition between the United States and Canada that many businesses in border regions say they rely on for their profit margin.

In January, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice rolled out the implementation schedule for the plan, promising to phase in the new requirements at sea and land ports, but they finessed the question of the technology to be used.

Both agencies have now signed up to the concept of employing radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags -- the tiny chips used to keep track of palettes and other goods by big retailers like Wal-Mart. But they differ on the type of RFID technology.

In one corner, the Department of Homeland Security, is advocating the use of so-called vicinity RFID, akin to that used in the EZ-Pass toll payment system, where readers can scan the tag from several feet away.

In the other corner, the Department of State -- fresh from a bruising experience with privacy and security criticisms of the chips to be used in its electronic passports -- is advocating what is called proximity RFID, where the reader has to be no more than an inch or two away from the card.

A key issue is what officials call "facilitation." How long will it take for people to pass through border crossing points, which already become congested at peak times? Elaine Dezenski, who last month quit her post as the department's official in charge of implementing the initiative, told UPI that in the debate about technical specifications, officials were looking for a double benefit.

"You can meet the new identity and citizenship verification requirements and move people through the border more quickly with the right technology in place," she said, adding that policy-makers had aimed from the beginning to use the new policies and technologies they required to speed the crossing process

"It was clear very early on that simply allowing for new identity cards without solving the issue of how to move people more quickly through the ports of entry was not the best policy."

In order to ensure that in return for the effort and expense of acquiring the new card travelers got a smoother border-crossing experience, the technology needed to "pre-position the data," Dezenski said, so that as a car approaches the inspection point, the information on the card is already visible to the inspector.

"In order to make that (facilitation) work, you have to be able to get the data the card accesses to the inspector before the vehicle is in front of him, so that he can start preparing for the inspection," she said.

Dezenski said that this objective could be achieved with either kind of RFID technology, depending on the configuration of the inspection point, although most observers seem to agree that the vicinity-type cards would make it simpler.

But a recent draft report from the privacy office of the Department of Homeland Security identified a series of issues with RFID technology, concluding that it "appears to offer little benefit when compared to the consequences it brings for privacy and data integrity."

Privacy advocates successfully derailed a plan to use vicinity technology for the new generation of electronically enabled U.S. passports after tests showed that information could be "skimmed" or stolen from the passport's chip, creating important vulnerabilities exploitable by identity thieves and other malefactors.

Jim Williams, the official at the department in charge of the US-VISIT system for tracking foreign visitors to the United States, says that "privacy is always a concern," but adds that he believes the draft report "didn't fully recognize the benefits" of the technology.

Williams said Homeland Security was working on a number of ways to make the vicinity technology secure. For example, he said, the data would be encrypted, and would consist only of a unique personal identity number, which border equipment would then use to recover the card-holder's details from a secure central database.

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