Outsourcing Border Controls: American Passports

Before my blog service started to go haywire, I had drafted a post to draw readers' attention to what I think is a very important article by fellow ex-Foreign Service blogger Pat Kushlis in "Whirled View."  Writing last Friday in "Losing 'the keys to the kingdom'," Pat drew my attention to what has to be one of the worst ideas yet in the realm of "outsourcing" and "privatizing" functions that used to be national and governmental.  Passports.  American passports.  Made in... Thailand.

This is the second time in two weeks that American passports, the keys to the kingdom, have been compromised. Bill Gertz of the Washington Times, of all newspapers, broke both stories. These are two separate instances of gross mismanagement and perhaps even malfeasance. Both relate to the outsourcing epidemic for which our current administration is famous.  Not only did the GPO – the federal government’s printing press – grossly overcharge the State Department for the production of passports when GPO is supposed to undertake the work at cost, but it also outsourced the work to Smartrac, a European company with production facilities in Thailand. “Smartrac,” according to Gertz, “divulged in an October 2007 court filing in The Hague that China had stolen its patented technology for e-passport chips, raising additional questions about the security of America's e-passports.” (emphasis added)

When you put the words "US high-tech e-passport chips," "technology stolen by China," and "production facilities in Thailand," in the same sentence, someone's common sense alarm should have been ringing loudly.  And all this, for a RFID technology that has itself been shown as vulnerable to hacking.

But rest assured, the GPO tells us, according to The Federal Times:

The government had no choice but to outsource a key security feature of the new electronic passports to a foreign corporation, the Government Printing Office said in response to a series of critical news reports by The Washington Times last week.  GPO is contracting with a Dutch company, which does part of its work in Thailand, to produce and implant a data chip in the back cover of each new passport. The company, Smartrac Technology Ltd., was the only company in the world that produced a chip to store passport information that met the State Department’s standards.  Smartrac warns that because Thailand is politically unstable, production could be halted, according to news reports.

I sent "Losing the keys to the kingdom" to a longtime expat in Thailand with extensive experience throughout Asia.  After first thinking that it was an April Fool's gag, this is what he had to say:

Very unwise to not have total control over the production of passports. There have been several arrests of Pakistani forgers over the years, producing every kind of valuable document from student IDs to national passports. Imagine if they got just a few blanks. Also, China fields many workers in high-tech factories in the USA, where secrets are obtained and transferred to the motherland.  With the virtual takeover of Thailand by Chinese business people, and Thailand's proclivity to corruption and making a quick buck, the idea of making passports outside the USA should not be even considered.

Well yes, but then GPO honcho Robert C. Tapella is a believer in the power of private enterprise in public ventures, and a practicioner of the revolving door; here he is in an interview with a printing industry journal after his appointment by President Bush:

I was involved in the Bush campaign, and when President Bush was elected in 2000, I was asked whether I wanted to continue to work in the government and what type of assignment I would like. The only thing I was interested in was the GPO. In my roles with Congress, I had been a customer of the GPO.

My guess is that someone is on a fast track to some lucrative future business with Smartrac or some other outsourcers, and who cares if the next administration has to clean up the mess?  And this cavalier approach to sensitive documents (remember, with a stolen valid American passport, a potential infiltrator has a much easier time of slipping into the US) is from the same team which uses the highest of hi-tech to spy on Americans in order to "protect" its citizens.  Let's just hope that Smartrac opens their planned factory in the US before some resourceful Thai or Chinese entrepreneur gets his hands on "the keys to the kingdom."