Passport Technology Isn't Error Free

The following item was posted by Judi Hasson, a freelance journalist who writes about technology and lives in Washington, D.C.

It’s hard to know how safe we really are or if the federal government knows what it is doing when it comes to managing our security. Just last week, I had an example of a big snafu that turned up in my own mailbox.

My 18-year-old daughter applied for a passport, and it came without delay. (The State Department says it worked through its passport backlog during the summer.)

The passport looked good at first. All the information was correct, I thought. But the picture, well, um, the picture was not my daughter. It was a picture of a young woman with long, curly hair who looked nothing like my daughter. Well, my daughter does have long, curly hair, but that was about the only similarity.

A State Department official said that it is likely the correct picture of my daughter was scanned into the department's database, and it was human error that caused the wrong image to be printed on the passport. But if that's not the case, and given that many government databases are now linked to check identities, is it possible that more government databases have the wrong picture of my daughter? And who’s got my daughter’s picture on her passport?

It took several hours of phone calls to get to the right people at the local U.S. Post Office to help me. When I did, they told me I had to start the passport process over. I had to send them the official pink form for corrections and two new pictures. Later, I was told to forget the pink form and just bring in the document with the wrong picture to the passport office on 19th Street in Washington, D.C. Oh, and of course, the $97 passport fee would be waived, but not the cost of the new pictures.

The State Department official said the agency issued 18 million passports in fiscal 2006, and errors are very rare. “Frankly, we are human,” the official said. “The error rate is very low. The important thing in issuing a passport is that it has great security information.”

It was only a month ago that the State Department got some bad press when it was disclosed that the department printed the wrong birth date on a passport. Instead of 1972, the date was printed as 1872, according to the official.

As for my daughter's passport, the official said the State Department cannot tell if there has been a one-to-one swap. In other words, my daughter’s picture may be floating around on someone else’s passport, and there may be a domino effect of passports having wrong pictures. “The errors happen. We minimize them. We have a series of quality control measures. The thing we can do is fix them as fast as we can,” the official said.

But where is my daughter’s picture? And who is that friendly young woman staring out from my daughter’s new passport?