US company to vouch for Australian identities in new e-Passports?

Later this year, US company Cybertrust will be vouching for your Australian identity when you present an e-passport at international airports.
And the International Civial Aviation Organisation will be verifying that your passport was issued by the Australian government.
That appears to be the upshot of this weeks news that Australia's new e-passports will use Cybertrust's public key infrastructure (PKI) to secure the micro-chip that will be embedded in the document.
The new e-passports, developed to meet the increased security requirements of the US post September 11th, will have a digital image of the passport owner embedded in the micro-chip.
And a public key will also be programmed into the chip, so that the e-passport reader machines at international airports will be able to verify both that the image data has not been altered, and that the picture is of an Australian citizen.
In practice, this will mean that the e-passport reader machines will look-up a Cybertrust database to verify the passport data.
Australia is fast becoming the 53rd state of the US it seems.