The country's in the very best of hands.

(Sarcasm tag not necessary, Brian! Gods, I love ya!)

Seeing this reminded me that I have to fill out applications for my daughters. (I already have mine.) Grandma is giving the girls their passports as a Christmas gift this year. BF should probably get his as well. Not that we're going anywhere outside of the continental US, as far as I know. Yet.

(When presented with the results of the GAO investigation, the State Department agreed that there was a "major vulnerability" in the passport issuance process and agreed to study the matter.)

Nice of them to not press charges against the GAO investigator for doing his job.

The problem can't be fixed at the federal level unless the federal government one way or another gets a grip - takes the process way from the states - on the root document of all, the birth certificate. As it is, every state, and in some states, every county, controls birth certs - there is no standardization, there are no security features whatsoever, so there is no problem at all in faking them up. You can crank them out all day in your garage and make big money doing it. And if the root document is crap, it corrupts the entire process.

You might think that the federal cgovernment could at least check with these local jusrisdictions to verify these documents, and they do. It takes weeks for them to respond, those that can or care to. And remember how much money is at stake when it comes to false documents and immigration scams, so in effect the federal government is checking with easily compromised county workers in court houses. What's the point?

From the articles on tech sites about the new passports (back when they were being proposed)the new ones are actually fairly easy to forge. The chip is easy to read from a distance and creating a new one with that information is not too hard. Of course, under really close inspection they are clearly fakes, but chances of that close inspetion happening is small unless something else makes them question the documents. maybe something changed, but I doubt it.

You may know I work at Savanah River Site, for which I am not authorized to speak.

But this is public information:
A Federal program replaced our ID badges with "new, more secure" ones.

Hm.

I, my family, and my neighbors were subjected to personal interviews to get my "old" badge. Investigators went to Florida and SC in the process.

For the "new" badge, all I had to do was present a couple of documents, like a DL and a passport.

And the new badges are harder to read - resulting in long lines at the gate, as over 8500 people arrive on just two roads for the day shift.

Beware of "gee whiz" disease. Computerization and flashy colors does not a sound process make.

Stupidity is rampant.

Wait, what? I just renewed my passport and didn't need to provide biometrics. If I didn't give them a fingerprint, where did they get it from? There's one on my driver's license but I certainly didn't send that in with my passport renewal.(I'm still waiting for the passport to come back in the mail so I haven't actually seen it yet).

What am I missing here?

What you are missing that the State Department and its Passport Office can request your fingerprionts from the state where you got your DL.

It's standard practice in law enforcement agencies, so I don't see why it would be any different for State. And BTW, the same holds for Radwaste's new docs too. They didn't need him to submit stuff they either already had or could get on their own.

Oh, thanks. That was about the only thing I could figure. DBF said possibly the next time I travel internationally I may have to be fingerprinted. I hope that's wrong, as it takes forever to get through the airport without that on top of it.