Did they move the border lines in Derby? I have had the pleasure of reading in two countries (thank you, Jim, for the tip!) and would be sad if one could no longer do this. And what a nightmare for traffic...

--claire

As a point of interest, apparently they're trying self-fund parts of Homeland Security; from the State Department:

Routine Services (Form DS-11)
Non-Refundable

Age 16 and older: The passport application fee is $67. The execution fee is $30. The total is $97 .

Under Age 16: The passport application fee is $52. The execution fee is $30. The total is $82 .

More info: included in that application fee is the $12.00 Security Surcharge, which became effective March 8, 2005.

"With any kind of luck the Department of Homeland Security will have been dissolved"

That would be very good luck indeed. As you know, Jim, I'll vote for whichever of the Democrats is the nominee, but I doubt very much that anything like this will happen. Certainly not soon, and quite probably not ever.

Failing, of course, remarkable developments that I can't foresee.

Entities like the DHS, once created, tend to be surpassingly difficult to uncreate.

Linkmeister #2: The execution fee is $30.

Good grief, bullets are getting expensive these days.

I wish I could feel confident that this insanity will end; however, that box has been opened, and it really now will take very little to corrupt future administrations with the notion that they can get away with nearly everything thanks to Bush and Crew. Once fear has been shown to be effective in keeping a population in line and unquestioning, I have very little doubt that the next power-hungry politician to take office will not exploit that.

I don't know. I do apologize for my pessimism.

Earl @ #5, further investigation seems to show that the execution fee is a method of making passports more accessible, payable to some 9,000 "passport acceptance facilities" around the country. The library branch nearest me is one of them.

"You pay the passport application fee and the security surcharge to the ''U.S. Department of State'' and the execution fee to the facility where you are applying."

So it's a method of subcontracting out work from the federal government to local agencies. It undoubtedly costs more this way than it would to have federal employees do it via the mail or walk-in.

A lot of those locations are, or were, post offices. (In nearly every town and city, so why not have them do passport applications? Although not all of the offices do; check locally, and there might be a number in the phone book for your local passport window.)

I can see bullets costing a lot these days: we're sending so many of them overseas that even the police are having trouble getting enough.

Patrick #4: That's exactly my thought. It's not just the DHS with all its employees, it's the billions of dollars of orders fulfilled by contractors, each with a lobbyist or three, each willing to donate money to politicians who talk loudly enough of the need for tighter security. It's easier to dispose of the nastiest nuclear waste, or of leftover chemical weapons stocks, than to get rid of a federal program with hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars riding on it. I have a theory that one reason why all the Republicans except Ron Paul are spouting nonsense about the grave threat of Islamofacism is as a way to signal to those federal employees and contractors that they can expect plenty of future employment and contracts.

The Democrats weren't opposed to forming DHS, and haven't, as far as I've seen, tried to get rid of it or shut down much of the security theater. I wonder what makes anyone expect that they'll do differently when the DHS is under the control of a Democratic appointee, ready to spread the patronage out among their friends instead of the Republicans' friends.

Australian Passport fees are rather higher, a standard one being $AU200 for adults & $AU100 for children. Despite this, most of us have one at some stage — I haven't renewed mine lately, but hope to when things improve. They don't have GST charged on them (that's our VAT/sales tax, cross-linking to another thread on tax). Post offices are the main place where you'd get the forms and go through the application process. There's a fun poster showing all the wrong ways to take a passport photo that I like to examine while standing in line in my local.
Australia Post (formerly the Postmaster General's Department, or PMG) is still part of the Federal Public Service, I believe. Is your mail service privatized, so they aren't 'federal employees' any more?

The hangman's bill was quite expensive back in 1930s-1940s Germany (via a great little page on the writer Erich Kästner).

What proportion of Americans do not have passports and never plan to acquire them? I've had students tell me that they'd never leave the US 'because the rest of the world is crazy'. I've also had students who are astounded when I tell them that my first passport was issued to me at the age of three, and that I've had passports from two different countries (they seem to think that's unsporting).

Both my children have had passports since childhood (US only). I wonder if that now makes them suspect characters.

Not one single terrorist has entered the US by slipping across the Canadian border.

If you include potential terrorists, don't forget Ahmed Ressam. One of the best cases of good behavioral profiling (not based on race or ethnicity, but on what the subject is doing) you can ask for.

Speaking of "if it ain't broke . . . " I think border enforcement was in pretty good shape prior to the fear-based system we have now. McVeigh and Rudolph didn't cross any borders to do what they did: should we have border crossings at state lines?

From: Department of Homeland Security

Dear Sir/Madam:

We have completed our background check and examination of your records, and are pleased to report that you appear to be clean.

To ensure that this report is properly attached to your file, please click on this link and fill in the form with your name, address, Social Security Number (SSN), and other information as requested...

-----
I'm surprised that I haven't seen messages like this yet.

Fragano, I didn't get my first passport till I was 33. It has since expired and I've never renewed it (not because I don't want to go out of the country, but because circumstances haven't permitted it).

Linkmeister #14: I take it that you didn't need one when you were in the military?

I can understand circumstances preventing you from getting a passport.

I find it interesting, btw, that it costs more to become a US citizen than to renew a green card.

Fees. The first time I had my Alien Registration renewed, it cost me $18.

The second time, it cost $75.

Most recently, it cost $300, and required a trip to another city.

As an alien, it seems to me that I could not have an American passport. Will my Alien Registration card be accepted?

DHS no more? No solid passport requirement at the US/Canada border?

Not if President Huckabee has anything to say about it. (If you listen to the wagging tongues of the media, he's already been coronated.)

Fragano, #11: I've never had a passport because I've never needed one -- I haven't had the good fortune to be able to travel internationally (with the exception of Canada, where I didn't need a passport). At this point, I'm not sure I'd want to leave the country unless I were doing so permanently; there's a significant chance that I wouldn't be able to get back in.

Fragano - AIR, US military personnel do not (or did not) need a passport when stationed overseas so long as they are on post or traveling between assignments - and may not need one otherwise, but I'm fuzzy on that one, having never been posted overseas (school was more important to me at the time).

I do know that while we could MAC flight into pretty much any US airbase in the world, on a space available basis (show up, if nobody bumps you, you fly, if not, wait for the next one), you couldn't get off-base if you didn't have a passport, if you went outside US territory, and weren't assigned there. But this was in the late 80s, and things may well have changed since then.

I have a passport, but have let it expire (need to get it renewed - then throw it in the microwave or hit it with a hammer or some such - RFID tags are Not Your Friend) because of unfortunate unuse (travel takes money).

Rob - A co-worker tells the tale of his cousin (who is Dutch) who travelled with him and his family over to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls a couple of years ago. Getting in to Canada was easy. Getting back to the States, when he turned over his passport, was (only a tiny bit) problematic - he had not, in fact, gone through the visa process to travel to Canada - so he was fine in the States, but the US border patrol couldn't let him back in, because he wasn't supposed to leave - at least, not to Canada, anyways.

Fortunately, clearing this up involved nothing more than some annoyed calls to various peoples (including the Dutch embassy in Toronto or some such), a validation sticker, and the payment of a modest fee to be turned over to the Canadian border guards.

IOW - I would check to make sure before wandering over to see the Falls from the side that is actually impressive.

In most parts of the US, it's possible to travel a long ways in any direction without needing to cross an international border; in fact, for most people outside of the northern tier and the southwest, a journey involving such a crossing is a non-trivial undertaking, even a luxury good.

At least in the past, members of the military could travel (under some circumstances, anyhow; I never had cause myself to learn the finer details) using their orders and their military ID. But it's been a while since I was hanging out on the spousal fringes of that world, so I don't know what the current rules are.

Really 1814? I was under the impression that the US/Canadian border was moderately hostile, with the occasional armed confrontation, up through the 1850s.

@11. The rest of the world is crazy? That's entertaining, I think they have part of it backwards. The US seems rather crazy to me at the moment. No offense intended, of course.

(I'm a Canadian, for perspective's sake.)

Actually there have been some phishing attacks targeting the INS part of the DHS, some quite old. It isn't a very common lure but it is certainly used.

And the first ever spam to be called such was the infamous Canter and Seigal 'Green Card' lottery scam which asked $75 for a service worth at most $0. So attacking the INS might be considered the original Internet con, albeit (barely) legal.

The underlying problem here is that the Internet lacks an effective authentication infrastructure for email. We have protocols (S/MIME, DKIM) but have not yet established their use as the default mode of sending mail.

[Would write more but Mrs dotCrime Manifesto says that this is a comment not a book plug, if it was I would mention that The dotCrime Manifesto: How to Stop Internet Crime is now available from Amazon but as it isn't I won't.]

PHB @ 23 -
Actually there have been some phishing attacks targeting the INS part of the DHS, some quite old. It isn't a very common lure but it is certainly used.

The IRS certainly seems to be a popular source point for phishing attacks these days - I've gotten a few dozen of those recently, although Ebay and Paypal are still the most common attacks I get (or maybe the various "buy this cheap stock" crap).

Fragano @ #15, there was no passport required when I was in the Navy flying between Hawai'i and Japan in 1972-1974. I had shore duty, but I doubt my colleagues afloat needed passports when they were on WestPac cruises to Taiwan, HK, Subic, etc. I suspect that was part of negotiated agreements between the Pentagon, State, and the various countries.

PHB @ 23 ...
The underlying problem here is that the Internet lacks an effective authentication infrastructure for email. We have protocols (S/MIME, DKIM) but have not yet established their use as the default mode of sending mail.

One of the (many) underlying problems is that people who should know better persist in the misguided belief that it's possible to have one, or a limited set of "true roots", which are somehow reliable means, run by reliable sources, that produce reliable authentication for email (et al). The persistent and ongoing issues with DNS make it quite obvious that the ASN1/X.509 models of hierarchical structures have fatal flaws[0].

[0] This without getting into the question of whether such things are manageable at all, given that operational concerns have traditionally been relegated, by certain parties, to the same unfortunate realm as "the proof is simple, and is left to the reader" (which as we all know is not at all the case). In theory, there is no different between theory and practice. In practice, theory and practice seldom agree.

Fragano@ #11 - I recall reading somewhere a few years back that somewhere between 10% and 20% of Americans have a passport. I do not know if that means "have an active passport", or "have ever had a passport issued."

I didn't get my first passport until I was 30, although I visited Canada several times as a child. The Washington State/British Columbia border isn't quite as porous as that on the East Coast, because settlements are sparser, but people who do live right on the border certainly have bounced back and forth regularly in the past.

One of the other quirks of passport systems is the handling of merchant seamen, but now they seem to need regular travel possports as well.

xeger @ 26

the misguided belief that it's possible to have one, or a limited set of "true roots"

It's my belief that this is the result of a deap-seated cultural bias that runs counter to our (admittedly at this point somewhat limited) knowledge of how systems work, at least in our mathematical models. There's a fundamental distrust of distributed systems in our (Western European, anyway) culture, a distrust that is often verbalized by the objection "but there's nobody in charge!" One of the reasons I've pretty much dropped out of the distributed systems business is that I got very tired of fighting that battle over and over. Maybe the next generation can get somewhere with it, after they're done cleaning up the mess that non-distributed software agents make.

Living four miles from the border, I can not tell you how happy this makes me. I can't imagine having to get a passport because I want to take a quick jaunt to pick up smoked meat or some annuals or lumber -- yet the best sources for these are far closer to me by leaving the country than by seeking out an American vendor.

As a Canadian immigrant-or-expat in the U.S., the passport requirement has been really worrying; until just recently, Canadians living abroad needed a guarantor who was a member of a narrow set of professions (lawyer, doctor) who has known you for two years; my freelancing sister hasn't had a doctor in years, and I've moved every two years since college.

They changed the rules so that we can be each other's guarantors, thank goodness...

Scott @19 You recall correctly however, military travel standards have changed immensely post-9/11. Military are asked not to travel in uniform (not that the GI spec haircut doesn't give them away...), not to show orders or mil I.D.. Most folks traveling to and from duty station of deployed facility were required to get a passport (as of early 2006, when I left the service).

Scott @ 19 et al. A passport was not required for military personnel in Europe in the late 70s and early 80s for travel within and between NATO member countries plus France. I travelled all over Western Europe on my Army ID card.

The only time I ever ran into any friction was in the UK where an officious immigration officer insisted that he had to stamp something. We examined my leave form and found a empty rectangular box labeled "Remarks" which he promptly stamped and sent me on my way.

Rob Rusick #16: Accepted for what purpose? If you're a green card holder, to enter the US you need both the green card and a passport.

Lee #18: Why do you think they wouldn't let you back in? Historically, the US has punished dissidents by forbidding them to travel outside the country.

Scott Taylor #19 & Linkmeister #25: I'm glad you're confirming what I thought. I expect that Linkmeister is right, and the movement of US service personnel was covered by base treaties.

Oliviacw #27: Thanks.

Dave Bell #28: I know some countries -- including the UK -- used to issue seamen with special passports.

Debra Doyle #20: That's true. It does seem to breed considerable insularity.

Lyli #22: The idea that the opinions of people outside the US might count for something is not always easy to get across. It's the same kind of imperial entitlement that was found in the British middle and upper classes in the late Victorian era.

Fragano, while we're talking about U.S. citizens and attitudes towards passports--there is also (I suspect) a sort of deep-seated and relatively common belief that getting a passport is supposed to be easy. I don't know why that attidute hasn't disappeared completely in the past few years, but I do know all sorts of people who seem to feel that if ever they need a passport all they have to do is apply for one and poof! it will arrive in the mail.

It may be just historical experience, I suppose. I got my first passport at 15, and I remember it as being a fairly simple process, taking no more than a few weeks. And the concept of someone actually being denied a U.S. passport on request is something that initially took me a while to wrap my brain around, once upon a time . . .

The idea of not having a passport seems odd to my family, but then we're British and, therefore, by definition crazy.

I regularly get phishing emails inviting me to recover the refund due to me from the IRS. That fact mentioned above will tell you exactly how succesful said emails are.

It's not just that, if you don't live close to the Mexican or Canadian borders, you can travel huge distances without reaching an international border. It's also that, until very recently, you didn't need a passport to visit Canada, much of the Caribbean, or the tourist areas of Mexico.

It took real effort to get someplace where there would be some point in having a passport.

What percentage of the European population has traveled the distances that, until the last few years, would have been necessary for Americans to reach a border that required them to produce a passport?

What contributes just as much to insularity, I think, is that North America consists of exactly three countries, and in all that territory, if English won't get the job done, Spanish will--and an awful lot of Americans do speak Spanish. (The Francophone Canadians all speak English, and will speak it to Americans who make any attempt to speak anything that could possibly be mistaken for French.) (This includes "Bonjour; do you speak English please?") How many different languages (and dialects different enough to impede understanding) in the same square miles as North America? I think that has a big impact.

Scott Taylor @ 19:

and the payment of a modest fee to be turned over to the Canadian border guards

Why did you just start with the bribe? Would've saved time.

Fragano Ledgister @ 36:

The idea that the opinions of people outside the US might count for something is not always easy to get across.

Oh, come on Fragano. We care about the ones we notice. It's just that there are only a couple of dozen we notice.

Well, the open border between the US and Canada ain’t broke. It’s worked fine since 1814, with no sign of wearing out.

Surely you're forgetting St. Albans, Vermont.

Fragano Ledgister @ 36

Warning: offensively racist language referred to here.

Indeed. Replace 'wog' with 'towelhead' globally and I suspect a lot of the invective would come over verbatim.

I suspect the passport thing is another one of those "Americans think a hundred years is a long time. Europeans think a hundred miles is a long journey" sort of things - for many Americans (even many on the Northeast coastline) a foreign border is either a day (or more) drive, or a plane ticket away - Boston is 4 hours from Sherbrooke, and NYC is seven and change - and those are comparatively close - Atlanta is fourteen hours from Niagara Falls, Memphis sixteen, and Colorado thirteen hours from Nogales (and sixteen from Winnipeg).

So, for a lot of Americans, travel outside the US is something done rarely (if at all), because it involves flying (not cheap for many Americans - while there are often deals for trans-continental flights, that just means they are still out of reach of the guy who is paid just over minimum wage), and is time-consuming - you have to figure on a day out and back, minimum, with (typically) two weeks of vacation time a year (if you get vacation at all) - and that journey time isn't "driving around and seeing the sights" it's "stuck in airports and in a tin can flying through the air". Combine that with most of a continent's worth of spectacle and wonder to see right in our own back yard? You could spend much of a lifetime visiting US state and national parks - even bypassing the ones that are pretty much like another, and going just to the ones that have something unique to offer - and not chew through all of them. They just never needed a passport, because the opportunity to travel to a place they needed one never was there.

Travel to our two closest neighbors has not, previously, required a passport - a driver's license, birth certificate, and/or SSN card was always sufficient to get me over the Canadian border and back again - which is further incentive not to bother getting one. And, in a crisis of some sort, there are processes for expedited passports, when needed - you used to be able to get one in a little over 24 hours, if vitally important (and you were willing to pay the additional expense).

Europeans have usually needed passports because if they wanted to go on holiday somewhere other than the same general neck of the woods (and you don't always, naturally), it meant leaving the country, going through customs, etc. For Americans, that is often not the case - driving eight hours in any direction* (except maybe in parts of the Plains states, where driving eight hours gets you... more Plains states) gets you somewhere that is recognizably different - while still in the US.

(Eight hours gets me to Richmond VA, Bangor ME, Cincinnati OH, Indianapolis IN, almost to Chicago IL, and all points in between. Including Canada in that, it gets me to everywhere between Quebec and Sault Ste Marie - this assuming my normal driving speeds, and not what Google Maps thinks is legal, and ignoring all but minimal stops along the way, naturally. Your Driving May Vary.)

John M. Arkansawyer @ 40
Scott Taylor @ 19:
and the payment of a modest fee to be turned over to the Canadian border guards
Why did you just start with the bribe? Would've saved time.

Wasn't me - this is the family of a guy at work (he's second generation Dutch immigrant on his father's side - I've got some Dutch ancestry, but it's all tied up in American Mutt on my father's side).

My understanding is that the fee was the typical "this is how much it costs to process a visa to Canada" thing. It was pretty minimal - twenty-fifty bucks Canadian, or some such, I'm not sure of the details.

Bruce, #29: There's a fundamental distrust of distributed systems in our (Western European, anyway) culture, a distrust that is often verbalized by the objection "but there's nobody in charge!"

I submit that there's a very good reason for this. Most people, by the time they're 30, have had at least one experience with the sort of customer-service runaround that goes, "That's not my department, you'll have to call the people at X," lather, rinse, repeat for multiple iterations and eventually get sent back to the first department you called. If there's no one in charge, then there's also no one to take responsibility... or perhaps more accurately, no one who can be nailed down to admitting responsibility! Think of it as being in an endless loop of multiple-vendor finger-pointing.

Fragano, #34: Actually, the paranoia is less about my political views than it is about the risk of not having every i-dot and t-cross that some DHS goon who's having a bad day can make up absolutely correct on my papers. "Because we can" seems to be the defining motto of US border guards these days.

Lis, #39: WRT dialects different enough to impede understanding... some years back, I was witness to an encounter between a woman with a very thick "inner-city black" dialect and a hotel clerk with an equally-thick Indian/Pakistani accent. It took a while for her to get a room! I could understand both of them well enough, and was tempted to offer to translate, but I was afraid that doing so would be offensive.

Lee @ 45... no one who can be nailed down to admitting responsibility

That sounds like my own experiences with AOHell.

Lis @39 --What percentage of the European population has traveled the distances that, until the last few years, would have been necessary for Americans to reach a border that required them to produce a passport?

Oh, lots, actually. Once the economy started picking up after WWII, Italians, Greeks and Spaniards traveled to Germany as "Gastarbeiter". When they could afford it, they went back to their countries of origin to visit family. Germans, meanwhile, traveled all over creation* for the fun of it. Travel was no longer restricted to the upper classes, and people took full advantage of it. And of course once the Iron Curtain fell, people started going back and forth over even longer distances out of mutual curiosity. Add the EU and the ever-expanding Schengen agreement, and you've got a lot of people going over long physical distances for business and pleasure. (Think about it...24! countries! and no passport required for travel among them.)

*And I do mean all over creation. Australia, Costa Rica, Laos -- vacation destinations of acquaintances that occur to me spontaneously. I was bemused to hear two couples playing "Can You Top This?" about their vacations. One couple went on about how beautiful the steps of some temple in Laos were. The other couple parried with, "Ah, but did you see the view from the rear steps?"

I did not get a passport until I was in my twenties. That is not because I did not leave the U.S., but because the other countries I visited were Canada and Mexico. No passport was needed for a U.S. citizen to enter or leave either. My mother who had her 86th Birthday a few days ago, has never had a passport for the same reason. Remember that until the 80's flying overseas was expensive. Lot's of people never went anywhere that required flying. I imagine you will start getting people born inside the passport free zone of the EU who get passports late for similar reasons. Especially since I suspect the era of cheap flying will prove a bubble soon; if we take global warming seriously and start pricing emissions, flying will get a LOT more expensive - and become a luxury most people can afford only once a decade or so.

Lee, #18: You live in Texas and you've never wanted to travel in Mexico? Must be that spell that keeps USers from thinking about what's to the south.

A better question about passports is, as with voter registration, why isn't it easy to get one? Why isn't application automatic with state id? Or, even, why isn't state id enough? If the government doesn't want a person to cross the border, let them issue a stop order. Passports are a holdover from continental European conflicts, have a lot of bigotry embodied in them, and I think it's time to retire them.

Lis @ 39: The Francophone Canadians all speak English, and will speak it to Americans who make any attempt to speak anything that could possibly be mistaken for French.

This is largely but not universally true in large multicultural centres such as Montreal. But elsewhere in the province... no. Really no. There are plenty of Québecois who don't speak English, and are violently offended by any attempt to communicate with them in that language, no matter how polite or well-intentioned the attempt.

"By June of 2009 we’ll have a new president. We’ll have a new congress. With any kind of luck the Department of Homeland Security will have been dissolved. Maybe Senator Leahy has bought us enough time that this security-theater insanity will miss us entirely"

Ten bucks Canadian says that even if by some fluke a Democratic candidate gets in, this doesn't happen and DHS is still around in 2012. Five bucks says that the dem will decide to show that they aren't weak by introducing some measure even more addle-brained than the Repugs proposed.

Isn't it time that people start reporting to DHS when they want to travel between US cities?

Scott Taylor @43:
Europeans have usually needed passports because if they wanted to go on holiday somewhere other than the same general neck of the woods (and you don't always, naturally), it meant leaving the country, going through customs, etc.

Ain't that the truth. When I first visited my in-laws in the southern part of the Netherlands, we always brought our passports when going on an afternoon drive. I was there the night they took the hacksaws to the border barriers; I remember how revolutionary it seemed.

(Even more revolutionary, but not relevant to the conversation: the Euro. They had three bowls of pocket change in their kitchen: one Belgian, one German, one Dutch. Scoop up a handful as appropriate depending on where you're going this afternoon.)

James @ 51

I hope that last line was a joke ... because it's beginning to feel like that's where some people would like us to go.

What worries me is thinking about families who live out here who won't, say, be able to afford to visit Grandma in Mexico for a weekend, because she happens to live on the other side of the border and getting passports for an entire family is, well, expensive.

Here in the southwest, at least, requiring passports to cross the border means more or less splitting some families up based on economics.

Following up on my comments @ 50 to Lis @ 39 -- that sort of xenophobic provincialism is, unfortunately, not limited to the francophones in the region. A few months ago, one of the idiots was griping in a local newsgroup: He'd walked into a store on the Québec side; the clerk had said "bonjour", he'd said "hello", the clerk had said "bonjour" again, and he'd walked out in a snit because the clerk was (as he put it) arrogantly refusing to serve him in his language of choice.

The administration doesn't want people going to Canada, because then they'd find out that people can actually live their lives without being permanently terrified....

David 56: It's worse than that. They're desperately trying to maintain the fiction that the United States is a civilized country, despite their efforts to move us ever further from deserving that label. If US Citizens see what a civilized country actually looks like, they might notice what a travesty of one exists at home (this was my own experience).

Personally I think these fears are unfounded, at least wrt the American people in aggregate. The American people didn't notice that Bush was a dolt in 2000, though it was blatantly obvious; nor did they notice his administration galloping toward outright Stalinism during the next four years.

Or at least they didn't notice it enough to vote the evil bastards out. It helps, of course, that when the bull elephant smashes down the living room wall and shits on the carpet, the talk radio jocks are there to tell them it's all "Democrat propaganda." But you'd think they'd at least feel the breeze or smell the shit.

Those who think the DHS will go away any time soon should read "Hellfire Nation" by James Morone, which is about the moral/religious current in American politics from the Puritans to the present.

He makes a good case for a Puritan vs. Antinomian struggle that pushes solutions to problems on each side's own terms (usually but not always "fix yourself and punish the wicked" versus "fix society and punish those who broke it). The solutions invariably involve establishing a bureaucracy or law enforcement agency to enforce a law or ten or fix an ill or ten, and they never go away.

I didn't get a passport until 1998 when I was 52 and was planning my first trip across the Atlantic. Before that my only border-crossings were a day trip into Baja California and a couple of visits to Canada--all with only a driver's license as ID.

That passport was set to expire in February 2008 so I recently renewed it by mail. Ten days later my new passport arrived.

It's one of the newfangled ones of course: "This document contains sensitive electronics. For best performance, do not bend, perforate, or expose to extreme temperatures". So what am I supposed to be worrying about when carrying one of these?

Honestly, I've always felt that these walls so many are so crazy to build are not really about terrorists or even immigrants. They are about making sure WE cannot get out.

Love, C.

If only that small a percentage of U.S. citz have or ever have had passports, what percentage of that percentage would you calculate are artists, intellectuals, musicians, journalists and writers and others who work for the media, whether television or film?

Is this group what is meant by the 'eastern establishment liberal elite?'

OTOH, it's difficult to find a college or university these days that doesn't sponsor extended study trips abroad, whether as individual programs or group programs. Europe, at least in my experience in the 80's and 90's was filled with U.S. college kids, and so was the Caribbean.

Love, C.

Love, C.

Constance @61:
Is this group what is meant by the 'eastern establishment liberal elite?'

You have put your finger on one of the more difficult and unpleasant aspects of being an expat. Having travelled, or (shock, horror!) lived abroad makes one, in many eyes, less American. One's votes and opinions are tainted, one's experiences a detriment to the dialogue.

I hate to think what it would mean about this country if it got to the point that I lied about all my time spent in other countries, with people who aren't U.S. citz, has been the most valuable, eye, ear, nose and throat (well mouth, i.e. food!) opening of my whole life. Without all that I wouldn't be who I am, but I'd still be yearning to have had what I so fortunately have had.

It's far more difficult to achieve these days, specifically, since unowoo took over the wh.

Love, C.

Constance @63:

I don't lie. I just know I won't be listened to.

Abi @ 62... Having travelled, or (shock, horror!) lived abroad makes one, in many eyes, less American.

I wonder if 'they' think the same thing about those who came to live in America. Probably.

Mary Frances #37: I suspect that's due to a lack of understanding of how important a document the passport is (as well as a lack of appreciation of the speed of bureaucracies). Green cards, btw, may take as long as a year to renew.

Lis #39: That's an important point (and you should add much of the Caribbean to the list as well).

John A. Arkansawyer #40: A couple of dozen? I doubt it's that many.

Janet @ 59: "This document contains sensitive electronics. For best performance, do not bend, perforate, or expose to extreme temperatures"

Hmm. Nothing there about exposure to microwave or other radiation, EM flux, ...

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers) #42: Indeed. You could, for example read Thomas Carlyle's essay 'Shooting Niagara: And After?' published in Macmillan's* Magazine in 1867 and with appropriate changes of word (from 'n.....' to, say, 'Muslim') it would not be too different from something written by some of our more annoying contemporaries (my first thoughts were Charles Krauthammer and Ann Coulter, but Carlyle was smarter than both of them put together).

* Yes, those Macmillans.

Fragano Ledgister @ 68:

A couple of dozen? I doubt it's that many.

Typical foreigner, doubting the virtue and wisdom of us good upstanding Americans.

Look here, buddy, there are four Spice Girls just to start with, and with David Beckham, we're under a score already. There's also Shakira, Ali G, Rupert Murdoch, Naomi Campbell, the guy who does our lawn, Borat, umm...Princess Diana, and...uh...

Sneaky, too, them foreigners.

Fragano @ 66: You're probably right. In fact, I'm sure you are. I know until the late 1980s, it never occurred to me that my passport was also proof of my citizenship. A passport was for "other countries' rules," not something I ever thought about needing in my own nation. My default proof-of-citizenship paper was my birth certificate. I wonder if that (meaning U.S. citizenship requirements) also has something to do with the way many Americans seem to regard passports as unimportant?

John A. Arkansawyer #72: Sneaky indeed...

Mary Frances #73: It could be.

There are times when I wonder if my Quebecquios ancestors (probably sic but) give me a right or return to Quebec.

When I was a kid, we routinely visited Quebec without passports or birth certificates. We even took the train across Canada in 1968 with nothing more than an itinerary.

In 1974, I got my first passport to go to Europe with a singing group. It was stamped when we landed in Germany. However, about a week later, when we were on a bus to go to Austria, all we had to do was flash our passports to get into Austria. Ditto Italy and Switzerland a few days later. I was, at the time, a little disappointed to not get more stamps, but now I understand that most European countries were past being paranoid about tour groups.

I don't remember if anyone raised this uptopic, but you can now travel over most of continental Europe without a passport. Too bad the Americans are so paranoid.

I worry about the need to lie when enemy-of-the-state profiling -- which doesn't exist of course -- includes "has passport," "has traveled often outside the country," etc. So you burn your passport and lie about having traveled in order not to be taken in for interrogration, er, wait, no, it's now called 'debriefing.'

I'm not joking. I've lived in places for periods where people remember all too recently this happening to them, to family members, friends, neighbors, etc. Along with this all your identification is taken away, effectually making you a non-person, which makes it nearly impossible to escape, er, go on vacation.

Love, C.

Is anyone familiar with the Peace Gardens? The park on the North Dakota - Manitoba border created as a symbol of the great friendship between the U.S. and Canada? Going to Canada, by car, was a typical summer vacation for us when I was growing up. We always stopped at the Peace Gardens and felt so pleased that these were such good countries that we didn't need borders and guards and passports and so on. The Canadians we always met there felt the same way. We were mutually congratulatory. We certainly didn't have passports when I was a kid.

Love, C.

One of the more background-worrying parts of getting a passport (American, post-9/11 but pre-RFID) was realizing that we'd just sent off my birth certificate, certificate of birth abroad (Honduras), everything that said I was here, without making copies we could find. They came back in a few weeks, but if they hadn't, I'd have been waving my baby passport, the one I reported lost instead of turning in, as proof of identity or whatever I needed it for.
Passport bureaucracy is not limited to these days, though. When I was two months or so, my parents came back from Honduras for the summer. There was trouble taking me with them because they didn't enter the country with a baby. Bribes were paid, forms were filled out, somehow it came out that it would be easier if Mom and Dad said they weren't married, but that was it.

Is there an advantage to having more than one country's passport?

Debbie @ #47--Up until the last few years, Americans starting from their homes in the US, traveling similar distances to those intra-European travels you're describing, would have had real difficulty reaching someplace that an American would need a passport to enter or to return to the US from.

And that's what my question was: What percentage of Europeans have traveled distances that, if an American starting from home traveled those distances, would require the American to have a passport? The number of countries in Europe doesn't change the fact that the distances involved, mapped onto North America, don't take you out of the zone Americans used to be able to travel passport-free. Sure, you have acquaintances who've traveled to the Caribbean and Central and South America, Africa, Australia, Southeast Asia--so do I. (And I think we may fairly consider travel from Europe to North America as equivalent to Europe from North America.)

So the question remains, what percentage of Europeans have traveled those longer distances?

Travel within Europe is undoubtedly more broadening than travel within North America, but the failure of Americans to travel internationally as much as Europeans do is not a product of American insularity; it's a product of it being relatively hard to reach an international border--and even harder to reach an international border where they need a passport, and the languages and customs on the other side are not the ones that either they or their parents or their neighbors grew up with. And American insularity, to the extent that it's greater than European insularity, is I think in large part a product of that.

Diatryma @ 79:

Is there an advantage to having more than one country's passport?

I've never had even one (note to self: must fix that soon), but I know having two passports means it takes two countries to revoke your ability to cross borders and allows entry to countries that only have relations with one of the passport issuers.

It also allows you to say under duress with some credibility, "I am not from the country that killed your family."

Randolph, #49: Answers to your question, in no particular order of importance:
1) I've only lived here for 9 years, and border tensions have been a factor that entire time.
2) Money issues. The only reason we were able to swing that trip to Seattle was that we had free airfare AND your offer of crash space.
3) In Canada, they speak my language.
4) Time issues. It's hard for us to get even a few days away -- and I'm sure you remember that Russ got a number of business-related calls while we were there!
5) There are a lot of other countries I'd like to visit before Mexico even shows up on the radar. Right now, my top 3 are New Zealand, Australia, and India.

Janet, #59: Your new passport has an RFID chip in it. If you're worried about unauthorized people getting access to the information on it (something that's remarkably easy to do with the right equipment), get a small metal box to carry it in. An AOL free-CD box will do nicely.

Or just put it in the microwave on full power for about 5 seconds. Then you don't need the box.

Laurie, #76: "Quebecois" -- ideally with a cedilla under the C.

Lee @ 82... Actually, there's no cedilla under the 'C' in Québécois as it is pronounced kaybaykwa, not kaybayswa.

I've had a passport since late 1990, when I got one for a school trip that would have happened in early 1991 if we hadn't gotten involved in Iraq that time. Since I was underage at the time, it was only good for five years and I renewed it in 1995. When that one expired I dawdled about renewing it because it was my only proof-of-citizenship (my parents had my birth certificate, and I lived in a different state), but I finally sent it off to be renewed in late 2006 and got it back just before the "Oh, by the way, everybody needs one to fly to Canada/Mexico/the Carribe Caribb Jamaica and such." (why isn't That Word in the spelling reference?)

I think I have one of the last non-electronic passports issued by the US. Which is a relief, for the security concerns, although I now have to worry about whether they're going to declare the non-electronic ones invalid and charge me to replace the thing in less than the full ten years.

This thread inspired me to go check, and sure enough, my passport expires in June 2008. I guess I'll renew. I don't need it for proof of citizenship; I have a copy of my birth certificate, but given the way the world seems to be tending, I think someday I might want to visit Canada or Mexico in a hurry...

xeger @ 26: I don't think the problem is the choice of roots, it is the idea that the only form of authentication that is valid is ultra-high assurance.

In DKIM we essentially dispensed with the need for a traditional PKI with certificates and such. Its a key centric model on the XKMS model, not a Kohnfelder model. You stick your email signing key in your DNS zone as a TXT record, easy, over and done with.

Thats perfectly OK for many users and uses. It allows us to build a critical mass of DKIM signers and verifiers. Third Party Authentication then comes as a value add where the third party is on notice that they have to demonstrate value.

So for example, you get email from a company you have never heard of, they sign their mail. You have no reputation data for them, what do you do? Today the only real option is content filtering which is inevitably error prone. Or consult some third party accreditation provider which is expensive if you have to pay. Better to have the sender pay for an accreditation by an accreditation provider that can demonstrate a trustworthy track record.

If an email is sent by a legitimate company that is willing to disclose a real physical address where process can be served the chance that they are a spammer is very small. 98% of all the spam being pumped out today is being sent by hard core out and out criminals. There is very little grey.

Receivers can choose the trust providers they accept in this application by performance. If they deliver an accurate indication that accredited senders have a low probability of spam it will be easier to accept the mail they send. If they don't add value their credentials can be ignored.

Accountability must be 360 degrees to work. That includes trust providers.

Lee, #81: Sorry.

Serge, #83: Okay. I could swear I've seen it with the cedilla, but maybe that was by people even more ignorant than I am. :-) At any rate, you're the Resident Expert, so I'll take your word for it.

Randolph, #87: Enh, my bad, I think. You said something as a joke and I took it seriously. Not to worry.

Lis, #80: "it's a product of it being relatively hard to reach an international border--and even harder to reach an international border where they need a passport, and the languages and customs on the other side are not the ones that either they or their parents or their neighbors grew up with"

Lis, you're talking nonsense. There's a lot of people close to the Mexican border.

Regarding military travel:

For places in which we have troops stationed there are Status of Forces Agreements (SOFA). The SOFA will define what travel is allowed, and what is required.

Generally the requirements are, individuals stationed in country, or in country to participate in an excercise, need only orders and ID card. In Europe, generally speaking, so long as one has a passport one can take "leave en route" and overstay orders.

Japan, forbids this. If one wishes to play tourist, one has to be stationed (or under orders) and take leave. When one's orders expire, one has to make landfall in the US, before one can return (on a civilian passport).

Ukraine used to require a passport (any sort) as well as orders; because the visa was categorised as "military purposes". Now they don't require a visa, and one may just present a passport at customs/passport control.

SOFAs are what allow sailors to take liberty without a passport.

As far as uniform. When I enlisted (1993) travel on orders was supposed to be done in Class B (shirt, slacks, low quarters, tie if one was wearing long sleeves; or the sweater).

By 1995, this was discouraged. Nowadays, lots of travel is being done in field uniforms, becase guys are going to/coming from leave.

Randolph @ 89: Yes, but in the past a passport has not been necessary for U.S. citizens to visit and then return from Mexico. (Or Canada. Or Jamaica, etc.) Americans living in the continental U.S. have generally had to either cross an ocean or travel across Mexico before reaching any international border where a passport was needed.

Lizzy @ 85: I'm having those same thoughts. I've never had a passport before (like many, I didn't need one, as my only international travel involved visiting Canada) but now I figure I should get one so that I will be ready when/if it becomes necessary. Of course, complicating this is the fact that my last name will change in 2008, when I get married...

Lee @ 88... No problem. Letter 'C', if followed by 'O', is always pronounced 'K'. Exceptions are with names like 'François', where the cedilla turns the 'C' into an 'S'.

My God, Jim MacD @ #1, here in Texas we're dealing with the construction of Berlin Wall 2007--through wildlife refuges, sensitive wetlands (even more so because they drain playas and other semi-arid areas), and the towns and cities of the Rio Grande Valley. Unlike the survivalist-nutbags of the Arizona border, the residents on the Texas-New Mexico border, including their leaders and representatives, HATE this wall. Of course, as Dem politicos, they've received no response from Their Government except for threats from DHS.

Okay, I'm late to this thread, and maybe this has already been brought up. End of rant, for now. But remember, Texas is lots more than Governor Goodhair, Idiot Son and Idiot Ranch.

'Summer Storms' @ 91 — Surely, if there'll be complications upon changing your name, it'd be easier to keep your birthname? Rather like clitoridectomy, it's not legally compelled, just socially enforced.

It's certainly been accepted here for some decades now. In fact, I remember one co-worker some 10 or so years ago marrying and having long & frustrating difficulties getting all her financial & personal identities changed.

Epacris, the point is that I want to take my husband's surname when we marry.

'Summer Storms' @ 91 — Surely, if there'll be complications upon changing your name, it'd be easier to keep your birthname? Rather like clitoridectomy, changing it isn't legally compelled, but can be socially pressed.

Keeping one's usual name has certainly been accepted here for some decades now. In fact, I remember one co-worker some 10 or so years ago marrying and having long & frustrating difficulties getting all her financial & personal identities changed.

Randolph@89: Lis, you're talking nonsense. There's a lot of people close to the Mexican border.

There are 50 states. Only four of them border on Mexico. For that matter, only 14 of them border on Canada (and that's counting a couple where the "border" is out in the middle of one or another of the Great Lakes.) That leaves 32 states that don't touch any place except another state or a whole lot of ocean, which also leaves us a whole lot of people who aren't all that close to the Mexican border or to the Canadian one either.

'Summer Storms' @ 95, of course, if that's what you've decided after considering the different aspects, I'm hardly going to try & forbid you. With a bit of luck, the system will deal with the change without problem, since it's still common.

It might be usefu, however,l to keep some sort of public listing that includes a maiden name somewhere, unless you're trying to break contact with earlier friends & relatives. There have been some very sad losses of connexion in my family where people searching for others after years apart haven't known married names.

Er. I'm sorry about the multi-post above, I must have slipped during editing.

Debra Doyle 87: and to reinforce your point and reiterate what has been said previously -- even people living on the Canadian or Mexican border did not need a passport until recently. I've made day trips to both Canada and Mexico with only a drivers licence and credit card for ID - Mexico when I lived in California, Canada when I lived in Washington. Until recently a U.S. citizens had almost an entire continent (North America) they could visit without a passport. The only exception was the small fraction of Guatemala that is in North rather than central America. For that matter passport free travel included the U.S. state of Hawaii, our colonies Puerto Rico and Guam, and I gather from up thread independent nation Jamaica as well. I wonder how many other places that extended to.

Summer Storms at 91: if you don't yet have a passport, wait until you are married, and then get it. As I read the instructions, if your name changes between passports, you have to submit a certified copy of your marriage certificate with the application for the new one. The website for info is www.travel.state.gov

Abi @ 52.

It must have been a long time ago if you needed a passport to cross from the Netherlands to Belgium! In that neck of the woods, have you ever been to Baarle? Thanks to various medieval treaties, landswaps, and trades between aristocrats the border is famously complicated round there - the Belgian side is called Baarle-Hertog (just under 7.5 sq km, population 2400), the Dutch side is Baarle-Nassau, (population 5000). Baarle-Hertog is 24 separate pieces of land - there are 20 Belgian exclaves contained within the Netherlands, and there are 7 Dutch exclaves contained within the Belgian exclaves! The general rule is that a house pays taxes to the country that the front door is in, but quite a few buildings show signs of doors having been moved over the years. At one time, restaurant customers had to move tables to Belgium when Dutch laws required them to close an hour earlier than Belgian restaurants.

#85 - Lizzy - be very careful about checking the rules. A colleague of mine was refused boarding of a plane, because his passport was not valid for "six months after his return date" - that is, the practical expiry is six months before the date. Shtooopid! This was for a one-week business trip from Canada to Israel. MSNBC story. The link in that to entry requirements is no longer valid, but the current version is Consular Information Sheets. The one on Canada is rather a through-the-looking-glass vision of Canada.

Anyone hold a NEXUS card?

Randolph @ #89--in addition to the points made by Summer & Debra (no passport needed until recently, "close" for residents of only four states), for millions of American citizens, the Mexicans don't even talk funny. They speak a language those Americans learned at home, from their parents. Sometimes even in Mexico. Yes, there area lot of illegal immigrants, but there area lot of legal ones, too--and legal or illegal, their children born here are citizens.

For the people who live close enough to the border to cross it easily, visiting Mexico is just not all that alien an experience. For the people for whom it might be, Mexico is a lot further away.

Lizzy @ 100: Our honeymoon plans involve travel in Canada as well as the U.S. (via land) so I'm glad to hear that the passport requirement may not be in force until after that time. Although Murphy's law and its various corollaries being what they are, I'm thinking I ought to get that passport beforehand anyway, just in case (the wedding is planned for September). It will be a PITA to change it later on, but for immediate post-wedding travel it should still be good, and if we decide to postpone the big honeymoon trip until later, I'll have time to update the passport.

Like I said upthread, it's complicated, but not impossible.

39: "The Francophone Canadians all speak English."

For values of "all" equal to about forty percent.

James, I concur. I visited Quebec (specifically Quebec City and Montreal) in the early 1980's and definitely found situations where the ability to speak French was very useful. Then again, I'm somewhat of the "when-in-Rome" type, and this particular trip was for high school students who were studying French - I was in my 4th year - so it isn't as if it bothered me any.

Epacris @ 98: Yes, I'm sure I will maintain some sort of link via my maiden name for anyone who might want to get in touch with me. I just want to keep my "everyday" lif