Belgian ePassports are flawed

Belgian ePassports are flawed (The Register):

Starting in late 2004, Belgium became one of the first countries to issue biometric passports. Unusually, Belgian passports include signature data as well as the name, date of birth and other sensitive data. Researchers from UCL, last month established that Belgian passports issued between the end of 2004 and July 2006 fail to include any technology that would prevent them from being read using off-the-shelf kit. The UCL team has published its preliminary findings here.
From the UCL website:
Not only do these passports not respect the recommendations from the ICAO but they contain non required information as the signature of the owner. The theft of this information opens the way to numerous malicious deeds.

Oh boy. And I'm one of the lucky ones. Time to start playing with the RFID zapper. At a quick glance, I only found one article from DeTijd covering this in Belgium press one week ago. The government states in the article that there is no need to replace the passports. I'm speechless.

In the future, DNA info and fingerprints might be added to the cards. I found a blog which discusses the issues of RFID (dutch) in these cards.