CORRECTION: In an op/ed published April 22 ("Lack of security in passport production is senseless"), columnist Eric Gibbons wrote that the Government Printing Office is a "State Department agency." The GPO is not a part of the State Department; rather, the State Department is a customer of the GPO.
The editorial also incorrectly stated that the GPO "outsourced the production of blank passports." The production of passports in fact takes place in Washington, D.C.
WSN regrets the errors.
You know that passport you just paid for, the one you're going to use when you go to Europe this summer and when you study abroad next year? Yeah, I wouldn't be so sure it's the most secure thing you own.
Passport vulnerability is due to the extreme lack of security in the handling of U.S. passports. The Government Printing Office, an obscure State Department agency created almost 200 years ago to print all government documents, has been outsourcing the production of passports to politically insecure countries and moving them to the United States without proper protection.
This follows the Bush administration's tight embrace of free market principles: the more competition, the better the product and the cheaper its cost. Perhaps it is the administration's way of lowering the national debt. Cut the price the government pays, from tank decals to passports, and it spends less money.
The GPO made the decision to assemble components of passports - the most secure and high-tech personal U.S. document - overseas because it concluded that, as GPO spokesman Gary Somerset told the Washington Times, "No domestic company produced those parts." That makes sense. If we can't even produce them here, it is difficult to argue against a global competition for production contracts.
But, as the Washington Times reports, GPO managers "rejected limiting the contracts to U.S. computer chip makers and instead sought suppliers from several countries, including Israel, Germany and the Netherlands," which means that there were U.S. companies capable of producing the parts; the government just wanted to cut costs.
Thus, instead of trying to keep the production of electronics for its most valued personal document inside the country among U.S. companies, the government gave foreign companies a competitive advantage. This occurred while Congress was holding hearings on the unfairness of giving an Air Force contract to homegrown Boeing instead of international Airbus.
Next, after these blank passports are fitted with chips, they are shipped to Smartrac Technology Ltd.'s plant in Thailand to receive a radio transmitter. Yes, that's right: Thailand. The Thailand that saw its democratically elected government overthrown in a military coup in 2006, had martial law lifted in 2007 and then held new "democratic" elections in December of that year, which resulted in the pre-coup ruling party nearly gaining a majority in the new House of Representatives.
Instead of (unfairly) finding a foreign company that would at least assemble passports within its own borders, we outsourced the production of blank passports to a company that then outsources them to a politically unstable country, a company that took China to court in 2007 for stealing "patented technology." Not only are we putting passports in unsafe countries, we're outsourcing them to unsafe companies!
What is the end result of this? The State Department is producing a passport that passes through multiple foreign governments and spends time in a country where Washington Times reporter Ben Gertz observes that political instability has resulted in "anti-government groups backed by Islamists, including Al Qaeda."
How someone signed off on this is beyond comprehension. Our country is at war against terror, specifically with Al Qaeda. Passports are what people use to get into our country. So, we send our blank passports to a country where Al Qaeda recently launched attacks and where democracy is hanging on by a thread. All of this to cut costs.
To make it easier for passports to be compromised, when shipping them to State Department officials, the GPO decided to use "unsecure FedEx courier services" until security concerns were raised.
How bad is it to have blank passports stolen, you may ask? According to Ronald K. Noble, secretary general of Interpol, they represent "the most dangerous passports" if in the hands of terrorists.
Because the Bush administration has commenced rapid dissolution of oversight and cost cutting, we have the most important and highly protected American personal document taking trips through Thailand, being hacked by China and becoming dangerously close to being accessible to terrorists.
Eric Gibbons is a contributing columnist. E-mail him at opinion@nyunews.com.
