Jeroen van Beek of the University of Amsterdam was given two valid passports that contained RFID chips. Using an $80 RFID reader, van Beek was able to obtain a copy of all the biometric data, substitute arbitrary values for each of the fields, then write the modified data back out to a separate $40 RFID chip. The Times reports that the process took about an hour. In an amusing twist-and to avoid charges that they were actually engaged in illegal forgery-van Beek uploaded Osama bin Laden's vitals onto the blank RFID chip. There's still the matter of forging the printed material to match, but the fact that this was already being done was the justification for the RFID chip in the first place. Those who created the RFID scheme apparently recognized the danger of this hacking and included some sort of encrypted hash value that could verify that the data had not been tampered with; van Beek's method does nothing to compensate for this, and thus leaves the forgeries at risk of detection. Unfortunately, a lack of international cooperation has meant that the risk of detection remains minimal and easily avoided.