Privacy and security risks of Green Card scanning with or without offical RFID protection envelope

Question

The presentation slides by Bishop Fox at RFID Hacking - Live Free or RFID Hard - 01 Aug 2013 – Black Hat USA 2013 – Las Vegas, NV briefly describes a number of RFID hacking approaches, and ends with a picture and statement about the sleeves that are now distributed with United States Permanent Resident Cards ("Green Cards"):

USA - Green Card Sleeve
• Since May 11, 2010, new Green Cards contain an RFID chip
• Tested Carl’s “protective sleeve”, doesn’t block anything.
• False sense of security

But details are hard to come by.

Questions:

• Does the official sleeve provide any protection? Has it been quantified?
• What alternative protective shielding alternatives might work better?
• Which RFID technology, protocol, etc is used by Green Cards?
• What are the privacy and security risks of using Green Cards with or without the official sleeve, or others that might be recommended?

Answer 1

For starters, it appears that Green Cards and passports from many countries use the ISO/IEC 14443 NFC protocol in some form. Wikipedia documents a number of common but optional protection mechanisms for Biometric passports, but notes attacks on them, e.g. allowing attackers to clone a passport by examining and scanning the unopened postal mail package in which it is delivered. See Radio-frequency identification