Sheets of watermarked security paper run through presses that lay down fine background artwork. The inks include some that glow under ultraviolet light and some that change color as the page tilts. British Series B pages carried a portrait of Shakespeare as a watermark in every sheet.

Parts of the artwork are printed so they stand up from the page and can be felt with a fingertip. Intaglio printing gives very sharp raised lines that ordinary presses cannot copy, and it can hide latent images that only show at a shallow angle.

The data page is a rigid card of polycarbonate with the RFID chip and its antenna embedded inside. Sealed in plastic, the chip is protected from water and bending. The newest British books also build a decoding lens into this page, which unscrambles a hidden image elsewhere in the book.

In US passports a thin wire mesh is built into the cover. When the book is shut, the mesh acts as a Faraday cage and blocks the radio signal a reader needs to talk to the chip.

Visa pages, the data page and the cover are gathered into one book and bound at the spine. The current standard US book has 26 pages, two fewer than before, because the endorsement and signature pages were merged into one.

A laser burns the passport number through the pages as a line of tiny holes. On the next-generation US book the holes get progressively smaller from page to page, which is very hard to fake.

Finished blanks travel to a personalization center. British blanks, for example, are made in Tczew, Poland, and only get their owner's name, photo and dates once they reach the UK. A laser marks those details into the polycarbonate page, so there is no ink on the surface to scrape off.

The chip receives a copy of the printed data and the photo, all signed with a digital certificate. Any change to the data breaks the signature, and border readers reject it. A US passport chip holds 64 kilobytes.