From The New York Times:
Paris Hilton is not alone.
According to a Los Angeles security consulting firm that went skulking outside the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood on Sunday, as many as 100 people who walked the red carpet were carrying cellphones vulnerable to the kind of privacy invasion that recently gained Ms. Hilton a new round of unwanted notoriety.
Three employees of the company, Flexilis, founded two years ago by four University of Southern California students, positioned themselves in the crowd of more than 1,000 people watching celebrities arrive at the Kodak Theater. John Hering, one of the company’s founders, wore a backpack in which he had placed a laptop computer with scanning software and a powerful antenna.
The Flexilis researchers said they were able to detect that 50 to 100 of the attendees had smart cellphones whose contents – like those of Ms. Hilton’s T-Mobile phone – could be electronically siphoned from their service providers’ central computers. The contents of Ms. Hilton’s phone, including other celebrities’ phone numbers, ended up on the Internet.
In a related privacy matter, the State Department is going ahead with passports that will include electronic data about the individual. These passports reportedly can be tapped by nearby scanners.
You are correct, the government is not putting any security on electronic passports. It will relatively easy to build a bomb that detonates when the count of passports is larger than N.
Especially for left-handed terrorists.