SAN FRANCISCO -- A Silicon Valley security expert is ruffling the feathers of some U.S. State Department officials as he seeks to show new passport cards are easy targets for people seeking to steal personal information.

Federal officials are responding by saying the new passports - which resemble credit cards - are safe if handled responsibly.

"I drove through here a few days ago and in the space of about 20 minutes cloned 2 passport cards," said Chris Paget as he motored through San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf.

Using an antenna, "reader" and his laptop, Paget sent out low-powered signals that bumped off the Radio Frequency Identification chips in cards and recorded them on his computer.

"It's all off-the-shelf equipment, all of this," Paget said. ""All of this equipment, obviously the lap top I had already, but the reader, the antenna, the cabling that connects the two it's all completely off the shelf bought second hand on eBay."

"I paid $195 plus shipping."

Paget works at eBay as an internet security expert, and has also worked at other Silicon Valley firms including Google.

"The notion that because you can get the number that you can somehow drop it into a blank card is a little bit simplistic," countered State Department spokesman John Brennan. "The card itself has many, many layers of security to it. It's extremely hard to manufacture. "

And those physical security features built into the card both overt and covert would be much much more difficult to reproduce than simply the number on the chip. "There's been testing done and we're confident that if you keep it in the sleeve it can't be read by someone who has a reader in the vicinity," said Brennan.

Simply recording the RFID tags is not illegal. And Paget stresses he went through the exercise to make a point:

"I figured if I actually do this in a real world environment through a practical demonstration maybe it'll convince people to rethink these RFID systems in our identity documents."

The states of New York and Washington have already begun driver's licenses with RFID chips, although California Department of Motor Vehicle officials say they will not.

The RFID chips are not in old-fashioned paper passports, but only in the already 800,000 issued by the state department since last summer. The cards are designed for travel between the United States and its two neighbors, Mexico and Canada. They are also used on cruise ships.