________________________________________ From: Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2008 6:55 AM To: David Farber Subject: Re: [IP] New travel document requirements for USA citizens For IP... pls snip my name. As a USG employee, I can give a little background on the passport issue. The price primarily changed because Congress freaked when they found that processing offices (in the U.S., usually the Post Office) charged a little more than it cost to process the passports. So State reduced that fee, but increased the security fee. The security involves all those things that you didn't mention -- the huge amounts of data crunching that makes sure that you're really an American, not a terrorist, not selling your passport, and not owing child support, among other things. The biggest benefit of that is that it's only a little bit more, but it's a nice round number. And, truly... you're traveling abroad. You're probably buying a plane ticket. You really can't afford $10 per year? ($100 for a 10-year passport.) The Passport Card goes under less scrutiny -- hence the lesser charge -- and is much cheaper to produce. Does it make sense? Probably not if you're from Ohio, going to Toronto for vacation this summer -- you could use the passport on your next trip abroad. (Since it isn't just DHS that requires them -- every other country outside of North America will want to see it too.) But if you live on the Maine or Montana border? Perhaps it does. As for the Australian model.. I've used it before, and it works great. It's a hell of a lot easier than traveling to Ethiopia, where you get a visa at the airport; or China or India, where you have to wait for an actual visa foil. ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE