![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
sign of the times
I'm applying for a passport (because I might want one in the next decade and I want to beat next year's RFID chips if I can). I just took a closer look at my birth certificate than I had previously and noticed something.
The form records, of course, information about my parents. For both, it has name, age, state of birth, and race. For my mother, it adds maiden name. And for my father, it adds occupation and industry.
That's right: this form has no place in which to record the mother's occupation. It's not that it's blank; the spot doesn't exist.
(What is it with the governmnet's interest in occupation, anyway? I guess on tax forms it acts as a really primitive sanity check, and maybe my occupation affects whether they'll grant me the passport. But it's not like they could have told my parents "nope, you're not allowed to give birth because dad's an aircraft engineer". Why do they even care?)
The form records, of course, information about my parents. For both, it has name, age, state of birth, and race. For my mother, it adds maiden name. And for my father, it adds occupation and industry.
That's right: this form has no place in which to record the mother's occupation. It's not that it's blank; the spot doesn't exist.
(What is it with the governmnet's interest in occupation, anyway? I guess on tax forms it acts as a really primitive sanity check, and maybe my occupation affects whether they'll grant me the passport. But it's not like they could have told my parents "nope, you're not allowed to give birth because dad's an aircraft engineer". Why do they even care?)
no subject
no subject
RFID??
Re: RFID??
Re: RFID??
Think about that for a moment. If you were an identity thief, how hard would it be for you to acquire or rig up a reader to sniff this info, and then go hang out in an airport, or major hotel lobby near an international airport, or whatever?
The reason they're doing this, according to the article I read a month or two back (and cannot cite more specifically now), is to speed up processing through customs. Instead of handing over the passport and having the agent personally inspect it, they can just scan you as you walk up to the checkpoint.
I wouldn't have a problem with a magnetic strip that they could just swipe (and, frankly, won't be surprised to find one on the passport either; I don't know how these things work). I wouldn't mind too much a scanner with a 12-inch range and encryption. But I object to someone being able to secretly snoop on me from 10 or 20 feet away.
At the time of the article they were planning a "spring 2005" roll-out. The fellow who took my application today told me it would take 4-6 weeks. So I should be ok, and by the time I have to renew they'll presumably have worked out the problems with the currently-planned implementation.
Re: RFID??
Wow. Scary stuff!
no subject
Me too. Michigan, 1964.