Passport madness

You are correct sir. It says as much at the top of the page and I missed that. Now I feel like an idiot.

Well it does sound like the next logical step in the process of neo-fascism. Don’t you americans have to already get your eye-balls scanned for your passports(i know i need to if i want to visit your country)? And don’t forget the Patriot Act that has been around for a while now. Also i suspect whomever was in government would end up pushing this type of stuff through anyway. You guys are on a program, one that the establishment(left and right) is fully signed up for, this just seems part of that process to me. When you going to do something about all this?

There’s quite a gap between retinal scans to confirm identity when you are presented with a passport and seeking out details on who was present at your bris and a precise chain of custody on the foreskin. A retinal scan is essentially reasonable on its face as a suggestion - you need to confirm that the passport you are handling is not a forgery and that it belongs to the person who is presenting it to you, and checking the person against both the passport and a database of people with passports is how you do that (though I suspect that a retinal scan is probably not of sufficiently greater effectiveness than simple fingerprinting to justify the cost). These questions only make the first fraction of sense if you assume that the United States government is going to implement some kind of Yahoo Mail, click here if you forgot your passport alternative.

Is there any way that they can even verify the information? What’s the maximum gov’t retention period on records of place of residence? (tax, DMV, or voting records?). If you’re over, say 30 years old, what are the odds of them even knowing if you just make it all up?

Man, like right now. I’ll bring the patchouli, you bring the paranoia.

Aren’t they still fucking that chicken on the data mining? This will totally help.

I’m guessing the home birthing groups don’t have very good lobbyists. I know a few people whose kids will probably be frustrated when they want to get a passport.

The amusing thing is that the last time I had to answer a questionnaire this invasive was a background check for employment, and I answered it using a credit check that I had approved from that same background check. Go go gadget invasion of privacy. Because I’m sure not going to remember the street address of the apartment I lived in for 6 months 10 years ago.

It really is stupid though. Look, you motherfucking bureaucrat, here is my birth certificate, here is my social security card, I’m a citizen, give me the paperwork to let me out of the country, BAM, DONE. You don’t need to datamine my life to determine how best to waterboard me when I come back, really. Private industry’s already done it FOR YOU.

It makes perfect sense. Perfect fucked up sense, but sense nonetheless.

Basically this lets them build up webs of connections between people, which they find useful for their Big Brotherly data mining activities. It helps them map out who is friends with whom, etc.

And yeah, it’s all very Brazil. Another mark against my ever voting for Obama again – nominally he was against all this Patriot bullshit, but that’s proven to be a lie.

Once more with feeling–

Page 2 is only for people who don’t have state-issued birth certificates from when they were babies. This is a tiny, tiny percentage of the passport-seeking population (the vast majority of home-birth people, for example, get the legal paperwork for a birth certificate soon after birth; you need to to get the dependent deduction) and so would be useless for data-mining.

Unless your home counts as a medical facility, you’d still need to fill that out.

The parts of the form for everyone are invasive enough. The government really does not need to know where I’ve lived my entire life. Hell, I don’t need to know. I know, because I don’t know!

Does it come with instructions that you must research the data requested? For example, am I obligated to ask my mother her address before I was born?

Because “unknown” is looking like a good answer to me.

And I don’t know that my mother didn’t have any children I don’t know about? How am I going to find out where they live?

Alexys Garcia, U.S. Department of State, 2100
Pennsylvania Ave., NW., Room 3031, Washington, DC 20037, who may be
reached on 202-736-9216 or at [email protected].

I heard she likes pizza.

Yeah, I heard you the first few times. However, I think that “But! It only applies to brown people” is rather beside the point, and furthermore that the rest of the requirements for everyone are plenty invasive.

The hurdle this would provide is ridiculously burdensome, does nothing to combat the difficulties they profess to face, and those difficulties are dubious in the first place as the sorts of people they’re supposedly afraid of would use a fake passport anyway.

And I think you’re entirely wrong that it’s useless for data mining. I think actually that (along with the chilling effect) is their entire point, and can see exactly how they’d use it.

The “invasive” requirements are not for everyone. If you look at the Federal Register entry for this, they expect any part of the form to apply to only 77,000 people a year.

> 13 million passports are issued yearly. This biographical form will apply to ~ 80,000 of the most difficult to verify, and the page with all the questions about the circumstances of your birth will apply to only a small fraction of those.

The State Department does in fact have to deal with a certain percentage of fraudulent passport applications. It should come as no surprise that they require additional documentation for some applications, and applications with no available birth certificate will require the most additional documentation of all. This is not a police-state conspiracy; nor is it the slightest incovenience for 99.4% of passport applicants. What it probably is is a formalization of the type of investigation they already do for problem passport applications.

Why am I supposed to be less angry about the State Department singling out a mere 77,000 people a year for ludicrous bureaucratic hoop-jumping designed to keep them from acquiring a passport? I mean, I get that they’ll all have brown skin and funny names and therefore not be me, but somehow that doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better. Maybe I’m just not properly getting into the spirit of things.

Have you considered the possibility that the State Department has a responsibility to deny fraudulent passports, and that a certain percentage are going to cause doubts requiring further documentation? Those doubts may in fact be racially discriminatory, but I don’t think there’s any way you can decide that just looking at this proposed form.

This whole thing smacks of the sort of ridiculous non-story that gets trumped up until it winds up on Limbaugh. Yes, it sounds bad when you know nothing about it and don’t think about it for a minute.

The government shouldn’t have the right to demand those sort of questions of ANY US citizen seeking to obtain a passport. A passport is not some favor doled out by the Federal Bureau of Monkey Gods, it is proof that I am a US citizen. Since I am in fact a US citizen, I am fucking owed a passport. You can charge me for it, you can take my picture and ask for a reasonable level of proof that I am in fact a citizen, but once I have established I am a citizen (and not through detailing to a ludicrous degree not required by security clearances) the government is obligated to give me a passport. This is not a particularly hard concept to grasp and I don’t really give a shit if the government decides that only a random 1% of people don’t get their rights or if only Sikhs with ceremonial daggers get fucked with this week because they kinda look Muslimish or whatever. US citizen, get a passport. It’s how the world fucking works.

I thought this supplemental questionnaire crap was for people for whom there was some doubt that they were in fact legit US citizens?

They should totally put a checkbox “I was born in Kenya Yes No.”