Keeping Them Out —Or Keeping Us In?
by digby
Remember when Alaskan extremist candidate Joe Miller cited East Germany’s border fence as a fine example and we all laughed and laughed because their fence was built to keep their own people in rather than keeping foreign people out?
Well, the laugh’s on us. We may not be literally building such a fence, but we are creating a virtual one:
If you don’t want it to get even harder for a U.S. citizen to get a passport — now required for travel even to Canada or Mexico — you only have until Monday to let the State Department know. The U.S. Department of State is proposing a new Biographical Questionnaire for some passport applicants: The proposed new Form DS-5513 asks for all addresses since birth; lifetime employment history including employers’ and supervisors names, addresses, and telephone numbers; personal details of all siblings; mother’s address one year prior to your birth; any “religious ceremony” around the time of birth; and a variety of other information. According to the proposed form, “failure to provide the information requested may result in … the denial of your U.S. passport application.”
The State Department estimated that the average respondent would be able to compile all this information in just 45 minutes, which is obviously absurd given the amount of research that is likely to be required to even attempt to complete the form. It seems likely that only some, not all, applicants will be required to fill out the new questionnaire, but no criteria have been made public for determining who will be subjected to these additional new written interrogatories. So if the passport examiner wants to deny your application, all they will have to do is give you the impossible new form to complete. It’s not clear from the supporting statement, statement of legal authorities, or regulatory assessment submitted by the State Department to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) why declining to discuss one’s siblings or to provide the phone number of your first supervisor when you were a teenager working at McDonalds would be a legitimate basis for denial of a passport to a U.S. citizen. There’s more information in the Federal Register notice (also available here as a PDF) and from the Identity Project.
What in the hell is this about?
If the worry is that non-US citizens are getting passports then they need to change the verification process in a way that’s possible to meet. If it’s about something else, then they need to explain what it is..
This is Big Brother stuff — they are setting up a series of roadblocks to use “just in case” they want to deny someone a passport. The question is, who and why? Basically, this will potentially deny US citizens the ability to travel outside the country. It may not be a wall, but it functions pretty effectively as one if they want it to.
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