Passports, Protecting Your Privacy

Starting in January the U.S. State Department will be using radio frequency identification chip. The idea is to make it easy for officials to access your personal stats. Which of course makes it just as easy for less than ethical people to get them too.
Wired recommends using a hammer.

4) The best approach? Hammer time. Hitting the chip with a blunt, hard object should disable it. A nonworking RFID doesn’t invalidate the passport, so you can still use it

The hammer might be the easiest but there are plenty of interesting ways a passport can accidently be smashed. It got dropped in the driveway and it got run over with the truck. I dropped a brick on it. Just make the accident plausible. Tampering with a passport is punishable by 25 years in prison.