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passports
This note considers passports and traveller surveillance
schemes in discussing privacy, security and identity.
It covers -
- an
introduction to past and contemporary passport regimes,
discussing standards, legal frameworks, history and
developments such as the 'smart passport' (with biometric
and RFID features)
- travel
surveillance - questions
about large scale traveller surveillance schemes, such
as the TSA regime in the US
- Australian
passport and travel data questions
- studies
and landmarks - key writings about passport regimes,
national identity documents, refugees and travel surveillance
(along with landmarks in the development of passport
regimes since the 1670s)
It
supplements discussion of the Australia
Card, privacy, identity theft, forgery, surveillance
and other matters elsewhere on this site.
introduction
Passports - official certification of identity and
authorisation of movement - provide individuals with the
credentials for participation in the "economic, social
and political dimensions of society". The absence
of those credentials, or identification as a member of
a stigmatised group, can conversely
facilitate exclusion and even extermination.
1990s forecasts that digital technology would result in
rapid demise of the state
(eg Negroponte's forecast that it would evaporate like
a mothball) and massive reductions in travel, with passports
either disappearing or becoming irrelevant as borders
dissolve, now seem deliciously utopian.
Passports and associated travel documentation have instead
survived. They form an integral part of ambitious schemes
for tracking terrorists and other offenders, with the
documentation being strengthened through inclusion of
biometric information in digital formats and communication
mechanisms such as RFID
tags that facilitate systematic capture of data by networks
that increasingly extend beyond national borders.
documents and databases
A passport is an official travel
document that -
-
allows an individual to leave and return to his/her
country of citizenship and to facilitate travel from
one country to another
- is
issued by official sources and clearly "evidences
the officially accepted identity and nationality of
the bearer"
- is
dependent for validity on the issuing government vouching
for the person named in the document
- is
also dependent on other governments recognising the
issuing government (eg Saudi Arabia does not recognise
the state of Israel and Israeli passports)
A
visa is a corresponding official document
that authorises the bearer to enter a particular country,
generally on a short-term basis and subject to specific
conditions (eg not engaging in paid employment during
a visit).
Passenger cards are independent of passports,
typically being used to gather information for immigration
management, quarantine and statistical purposes. They
relate to a specific departure or arrival; they are not
borne by travellers on successive journeys.
Passports are issued under national law, generally for
a period of ten years or less. Their use is subject to
restrictions imposed by the issuing nation, with some
jurisdictions accordingly requiring adherence to particular
doctrines.
International law has recognised a range of special travel
documents, notably
- the
passeport diplomatique issued to diplomatic
personnel (recognising the status of the individuals
and accompaniments such as diplomatic pouches for the
transmission of confidential communications), consistent
with the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations
(VCDR)
- passports
issued to government officials travelling on official
business but without diplomatic protection
- and
temporary documentation for refugees (such as the international
Nansen Passport, named after the Arctic explorer and
humanitarian).
Information from those documents - and more recently from
non-government sources such as travel reservation systems
and personal credit reference files - has increasingly
been used in the construction of networked databases.
Operation of those databases often involves international
sharing of information, justified on the grounds of international/domestic
security and public health.
Collection, mining, distribution and disposal of that
data poses a range of privacy,
governance, security
and other concerns. They include the adequacy of global
and national data protection rules, problems with the
identification and therefore correction of faulty data,
and uncertainty the performance of datamatching schemes
in detection of terrorists.
global frameworks
Passports are issued under national law, with states assuming
- correctly or otherwise - that their documentation will
be recognised and respected.
There are no mandatory global specifications for international
identity documents, although in practice most nations
respect standards articulated by two United Nations agencies
- the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)
and the International Labour Organization (ILO)
- and embodying broad international agreements.
Standards for the generation and exchange of transaction
information - transport/accommodation bookings and payments,
in particular involving large scale computerised reservation
systems (CRS) - has involved private consortia and industry
associations such as the International Air Transport Association
(IATA)
and Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication
(SWIFT).
Strengthening of those document and data standards has
been driven by the advanced economies. It has been reinforced
through entry requirements set by leading states such
as the US, which have a disproportionate influence in
the global community because most international travel
involves their nationals.
Standard-setting by the ICAO can be traced to the 1944
'Chicago Convention' on international civil aviation,
which sought broad consistency in cross-border travel
documentation that included passports, visas, health declarations
and passenger cards. In 1980 the ICAO's Document 9303
established a standard for machine-readable passports,
with all advanced economies thereafter upgrading their
passport formats through inclusion of core information
for capture using optical character recognition (OCR technology).
The ICAO has recently promoted development of 'smart passports'.
The expectation is that biometric information will be
held on a chip in each passport, with access using RFID
technology. The intention is facilitate authentication
of individual passports and reduce processing costs when
travellers cross borders. The ease with which data can
be captured also facilitates surveillance
by government agencies and data matching as the basis
of the invisible 'electronic border'.
That monitoring and analysis is increasingly leveraging
a systematic exchange of information between databases
maintained by different nations, by 'agents' such as airlines
and by international law enforcement bodies.
The corporate history of the ILO, which predates the ICAO,
has resulted in international agreements about the identification
of seafarers. As of 2003 some 1.3 million seafarer cards
were in use, well under the estimated 380 million passports
in existence at that time.
The ILO and International Maritime Organization have moved
to emulate the ICAO, with the 2003 international convention
on seafarers identity encouraging adoption of more detailed
(and readily authenticated) identity documentation.
history
Official travel documents such as passports have historically
embodied the ambitions, capacities and preoccupations
of the state.
Absolutist regimes in early modern Europe used passports
to control the movement of their people, in some instances
to authorise places of residence. The 'steam age' saw
a relaxation of formalities, arguably inversely proportional
to the bureaucratisation of society and the growth of
government administrative capacities. Increased reliance
on passports after 1941 to bind nations and manage visitors
was reflected international agreements about document
standards, although agreement about the treatment of the
people identified by those documents – or seeking
them – was less meaningful. Passport forgery and
fraud has kept pace with technological advances, in a
progression from one-off manuscripts to artefacts that
are primarily aimed at transferring information to networked
databases representing an electronic border against terrorists,
drug traffickers and other offenders.
The emergence of passports in Western economies dates
from around 1700, with Louis XIV of France issuing an
edict in 1672 prohibiting departure of his subjects or
entry of foreigners without an official letter of authorisation.
Contemporary theorists of the well-ordered state may have
envisaged a sort of paper Berlin Wall but in practice
most borders were distinctly permeable and, as a sequence
of high profile impostures demonstrated, lettres de
passage were not an effective certification of identity.
A few generations later Peter the Great reformed the tsarist
passport system, with guards providing a cordon sanitaire
on the borders and internal passports seeking to restrict
unapproved movement within the empire while providing
a basis for taxation, labour and military service obligations.
Expansion of bureaucracies after the Napoleonic wars saw
codification of passport practice in advanced economies,
with an emphasis on identification and authorisation of
government officials (particularly diplomats) and businessmen.
Most passports were for a specific journey (albeit one
that was often vaguely described and might extend over
several years), in a letter format with a rudimentary
description of physical features and handwritten endorsement
by an attaché or consul representing the country
to be visited.
The expansion of international travel from the 1830s -
driven by economic growth, the steam engine and telegraph
- was reflected in winding-back of passport requirements
in several countries. Britain had abolished a requirement
to present a passport in 1815, followed by France in 1861.
They did not disappear altogether; the US State Department
for example issued over 369,844 passports between 1877
and 1909. The number of passports in use across the world
during that period is unknown; some academics such as
John Torpey suggest that much international travel did
not involve presentation or verification of passports.
The forty years prior to 1914 were the first instance
of what Kenichi Ohmae welcomed in 1990 as the "borderless
world", with the emergence of mass tourism, ready
movement across many frontiers in both hemispheres and
free trade enjoying the same status it has had since the
1980s. Some observers have attributed that waning of passports
in the belle époque to liberal government conceptualisation
of the state, with borders properly involving quarantine
rather than restrictions on the passage of ideas, people
and commodities.
Others suggest that ideology was less important than bureaucratic
problems, with the steam
train resulting in bottlenecks as border officials
sought to ascertain the validity of differing identity
documents. Timely verification was inhibited by the lack
of international standards and the proliferation of access
points, in contrast to the 20th century where most air
travellers enter/depart through a handful of airports.
As an explanation the 'bureaucratic bottleneck' is less
than wholly convincing, given the effectiveness with which
many states built postal networks, the development of
bilateral/multilateral agreements that loosened passport
formalities and maintenance of ethnic or other immigration
quotas.
Restrictions were reintroduced after the outbreak of war
in 1914, often being strengthened in the 1920s as new
states sought to define their national identity and displaced
populations moved between countries and continents. The
new generation of passports - pocket-sized - typically
comprised a softbound booklet of several pages that featured
the subject's basic details (eg name, date and place of
birth) and photograph, a physical description of varying
exactitude, a unique serial number, the nation's insignia
and a rubric of suitable pomposity.
The League of Nations, predecessor of today's UN, convened
an international conference in 1920 that resulted in standard
passport and visa formats for all signatory States, including
uniform provisions regarding their content, layout, validity
and fees. It was was reflected in a range of national
legislation, with the USImmigration Act of 1924 for example
establishing immigration quotas and requiring all arriving
aliens to present a visa.
A follow-up League conference in 1926 established additional
international specifications for the standard passport
format. The League had less success with protection of
stateless people, despite humanitarian measures such as
the Nansen Passport. That was illustrated during the first
stages of the Holocaust, with the German government for
example restricting access by its Jewish nationals in
1937 and then confiscating their passports in the following
year.
The outbreak of global war in 1939 saw a strengthening
of visa and registration requirements, such as the Aliens
Registration Act 1939 and National Registration
Act 1939 in Australia and the Alien Registration
Receipt Card (Green Card) under the US Alien Registration
Act of 1940.
The 1944 Chicago conference noted above led to establishment
in 1946 of the ICAO as an agency of the United Nations
with a similar status to that of the ITU,
and creation of IATA in 1945 as the successor to the International
Air Traffic Association founded in the Hague in 1919.
Prior to late 2001 travel records received little systematic
attention from national security and police agencies or
from data protection agencies and privacy advocates, particularly
outside the EU. Travel data was essentially regarded as
a category of commercial transaction information: individual
records were perceived as being of little ongoing interest
for government agencies and few observers identified a
need for special privacy protection, in contrast to treatment
of health services information, financial records and
even information about library borrowing and video rentals.
technologies and futures
From a technological perspective passports have followed
the same trajectory as other key identification documents,
with a movement from handwritten script on paper, adoption
of anti-forgery mechanisms
(from watermarks through security threads and intaglio
printing to lamination, holograms and laser perforation),
inclusion of photographs and OCR text, and contemporary
incorporation of RFID tags.
Changes have been incremental. In appearance the passports
of most nations are very similar to those created in 1914
or 1920, replete with insignia, curlicues and gold leaf.
The Australian Passports Office thus boasts that in 1999–2000
production required 69,000 metres of gold foil, 1,100
litres of glue and 95,500 metres of thread.
In 2004 Barry Steinhardt of the ACLU warned that biometric
passports will -
- become
gold standard of identity verification around the world
- become
template for domestic National ID systems
- increasingly
be demanded for more and more purposes, abroad and domestically
- be
subject to private sector 'piggybacking'
He
concluded that "expansion is inevitable"
next page (traveller
surveillance)
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