Yes, this is correct. And that's exactly what this opens the door to. I suspect this will lead to some changes in the law regarding what route an image should take to be acceptable. It's been converging on this for a long time with ever more strict rules about what can and can not be in the picture. The list of requirements is quite long. It's a small step from there to having the passport office make the photograph.
> Yes, this is correct. And that's exactly what this opens the door to.
I don't quite understand what you mean. I get that it's technically illegal to swap pixels, but I don't think anybody can tell/would care if that happened. Only if a digitally altered picture can pass both a visual clerk test and facial recognition software will this be considered a problem.
Also, everything is still pointing towards having the passport office make the photograph. Right now post offices do have picture taking facilities - I think that if you just prevented people from taking their own to the post office, or made them take the picture at a place that never let you take possession of the photograph, that would be roughly equivalent. Hardly anybody takes a passport pic at home now, in my experience.
> I get that it's technically illegal to swap pixels, but I don't think anybody can tell/would care if that happened.
This was an extremely important part of the workflow we set up long ago, to ensure integrity. Even compression artifacts were 'out', this posed some very interesting challenges in controlling the laser printers available at the time to output grayshades (which they really did not want to do), early attempts at dithering did not meet the required standards.
> Hardly anybody takes a passport pic at home now, in my experience.
Interestingly enough, my partner at the company that I worked for in the 80's (and who is technically retired) has just started up a new company to make those pictures with your smartphone.
> This was an extremely important part of the workflow we set up long ago, to ensure integrity
I guess I didn't make my question clear enough which is why that sort of integrity matters. Is it just in response to government legislation that has nothing to do with the usefulness of the ID, or is there some sort of measurable impact on the effectiveness of the ID if that sort of integrity is not followed?
A crappy photograph with no compression artifacts is arguably a worse form of ID than a very well taken image that has compression artifacts. And with an extra layer of lamination and holographic images superimposed across the pictures, why is that allowed but discreet photo manipulation isn't? Is it just that the government doesn't fully understand technology so just knee-jerk bans all of it, or is there an actual basis for the suspicion of such things leading to bad identification?
The integrity matters because anything other than that is considered a falsification. It's a legal requirement, not a technical one. Of course you could flip a LSB in some grayscale image and get away with it. But from a legal point of view you've just done something that is not allowed.
It's illegal because the law says that it's illegal, and the law doesn't really have any justification based in fact or actual use-cases, it's just legislation and legislation has a mind of its own.
So this new model might lead to additional legal changes, but the main changes a customer might see is that if the government decides it was wrong and decides on another definition of "falsification" (not likely) or the government doubles down and requires an audit trail of the ID photograph from the taking of the photograph and all devices used to process the photograph.
> It's illegal because the law says that it's illegal
That goes for all laws.
> the law doesn't really have any justification based in fact or actual use-cases, it's just legislation and legislation has a mind of its own.
No, the law is embodying many years of experience with people attempting to forge IDs. So 'tampering' with the inputs to the process is tantamount to forgery, it makes good sense and it draws the lines in an extremely clear and non-ambiguous way. Far better than to leave some vague statements open to interpretation about what manipulation is allowed and what not (fun bit: people asking the service if we can edit out their wrinkles...).
> the government doubles down and requires an audit trail of the ID photograph from the taking of the photograph and all devices used to process the photograph.
In some places they do this, you get a certificate of authenticity with your passport photographs that you have to hand in to the officials.
That sounds just fine to me. It's currently a stressful process of trying to follow all the composition requirements and hoping they don't reject it. Might as well have them do it themselves. More work for whoever has to take the photo, less work for everyone else.
