U.S. Passports: made overseas, obscenely profitable

[OntarioVanMan]

Tom Barlow
Oct 23rd 2008 at 10:15AM

The Washington Times Post recently ran a three-part series that calls into question one of the primary tools used in our "War on Terror", the new U.S. Passport. According to the W.T., U.S. passports are printed and assembled overseas in countries with highly questionable security and sold to us at a 600% markup.

The Government Printing Office (GPO), the government agency that handles most government printing needs, decided to outsource insertion of computer chip and radio-frequency i.d. technology into the newly redesigned passports, and fought the suggestion to limit bidders to domestic companies. The winning company, based in the Netherlands, now receives the passport blanks from the GPO, adds the computer chip, then ships them off to Thailand where the RFID antennas are added. Remember Thailand? Land of government instability nestled in the crook between India, Russia and China?

The new technology allows border guards to scan the passport and wirelessly access information encoded in the computer chip. Producing these new passports costs the GPO $7.97, which it marks up to $15 to sell to the State Department. The State Department then marks them up to $100 to sell to us.

I had to read the story twice to assure myself this wasn't a bit of Dave Berry Barry farce. How could the GPO think that Americans would stand for such a compromise to their security? Aren't there ANY American companies that can handle these? And why does our government charge us a markup of over 600% for an essential document?

If we care so little about the security of our passports, why not simply let Wal-Mart handle our passport business? I bet they could get the cost down to $9.99, or two for $15.

 

[Turtle]

Any idea how many critical and sensitive electronic components for things like signals processing, encryption, guidance systems, firing controls and other computer chips for the US military are made in China and Japan? It's a jaw-dropper. The F-22 Raptor, for example, has several critical components that are 100% made in Japan, China and Taiwan. The integrated circuit microchips for highly classified defense applications that make up the bulk of the nervous system of our network-centric warfare capabilities are all made in China.

And, as microcircuitry architecture continues to shrink, becoming orders of magnitude denser, it becomes ever easier to hide lines that serve as Trojan Horse circuit designs, radio-frequency receivers and other backdoors to circumvent encryption, muddle signals, and induce data failure, not to mention the ability to send out commands of their own.

The costs and security issues of foreign-made passports pales in comparison to the idea that China, with one simple command via satellite, could ground most or all of the US advanced military aircraft and mute secure communications.

 

[OntarioVanMan]

Just another log in the fire eh?

 

[FIS53]

How else is the US gov't going to pay for all those projects if it doesn't have somewhere to make a profit?? Let's be nice as they really do need the money. All those golden retirment plans the gov't has cost a lot to maintain.

I could see having a canadian firm do the work as they are usualy good on security etc as the cdn mint prints money for a variety of countries (due to colours etc). They at least do have a decent reputation and do work at keeping things close.

I really do agree that a US firm should be doing the US passports and not a foreign country as this is the one document that can be used by criminals to gain access to the US and travel around the world with. Might cost a lot more but yes the price could stay the same and the US does have the chip mfrs to make it happen.
Rob