[kweks]

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, via plane. Many, many people use land borders, and most land borders don't have electronic systems.

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.

The flip side is that there are security flaws with partial electronic systems. My country passed a law against travel to Iraq / Afghanistan for citizens, and yet, because they have 100% electronic border control for citizens, (and Iraq / Afghanistan don't..) - my passport has never been checked, despite having 'illegal' visas plain to see.

[wildmusings]

>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?

[tajen]

If we truely have high-level terrorists crossing borders, then yes, every person's identity should be checked against national police files and thus, when Internet is down, every decision should be suspended, if we want to be consistent.

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.

[wildmusings]

I'm not talking about a momentary outage. I'm talking about, e.g., citizens trying to return home after a crippling cyber attack that leaves America offline.

[Inconel]

Apologies for my ignorance but what was the reasoning behind banning travel to Iraq/Afghanistan for citizens of your country?

[therein]

He probably has a South Korean passport. The reason behind the ban was safety but I don't think a country should enforce this through such bans.