Leaving U.S.? Passport May Be Needed To Get Back In
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S announcement that U.S. citizens are soon going to need passports to get back into their country from Mexico and Canada, is being played as a way to keep Americans safer. But like most everything else this president has done in the name of security, the only things there will be more of if this measure goes through are bureaucracy, hassles for Americans who don't have passports and never needed them before to travel to Mexico or Canada, and bad feeling between the United States and its neighbors. Already, Canada has announced that it might require Americans to show passports before they can enter Canada.
Potential terrorists are probably the only demographic group who will not be deterred by the new passport requirement. Since when have terrorists been intimidated by the need to carry a passport? Back in February, 2002, the New York Times ran an article by Jeff Goodell about passport forgery. Goodell asked Alain Boucar, the director of Belgium's antifraud unit, how long it would take him to put someone else's photograph in Goodell's passport.
Boucar examines it. It's a standard United States passport, issued eight years ago, with a laminated photo page. ''Five minutes.''
He sticks his thumbnail into a corner of the laminate, showing me how you can peel it back. (You can loosen the laminate by sticking it in the freezer or a microwave oven -- it depends on the type of laminate -- or, better yet, by dissolving the adhesive with Undu, a product that is easily ordered on the Internet.) Boucar then points to the little blue emblem, called a guilloche, that overlaps the photo and the passport page and is supposed to make the photo difficult to remove. ''You might see a little line here. But if I do a good job, you would not notice.'' Of course, that person would have to be around the same age, height and weight as me, but Boucar's point is well taken: doing a passable job of doctoring a typical passport is not very hard.
Boucar then explains the tricks criminals use to fill in stolen blanks: how they feed passports into laser printers, for example. Or how they can create a perfectly good dry stamp -- an inkless stamp that leaves an embossed image on paper and is used to authenticate the passports of many countries -- by placing an old vinyl record over a passport marked with a real seal, then heating the record with an iron; the record is then pressed onto a fresh passport. Candle wax also works. As for ink stamps, they pose no challenge at all. Years ago, forgers would cut a fresh potato in half and use it to transfer a stamp from one passport to another. Today ''you just scan the page of a passport into a computer, print it out, then take it to a copy shop,'' Boucar says. ''They'll make you a rubber stamp in two minutes.''
And, oh, yeah. Most who don't now have passports will wait, and then they'll get stuck with the "new, improved" ones, with the special RFID chip that can be used to track citizens, via radio, remotely, as they travel, at airports, or any other place.
Those passports have the EU kind of pissed off, too.
Bush and his groupies have a positive genius for coming up with the policies most likely to alienate people and make international relations worse. It really is absolutely astounding. Pissing off neighbors is just a bonus.
