Passport Authentication Online

There is a popular TV show here in Australia called "Border Patrol". It is a reality TV style, behind-the-scenes, look at the job of Australian immigration and customs officers and their day-to-day dealings with the public. Think of "Cops", but at the Sydney international Airport. It is a good show. It amazes me how many people show up with proper visas, dodgy stories, drugs, and illegal or bizarre goods.

One of the tasks of the immigration officers is to determine the validity of each incoming passenger's passport and visa. On the program they have often pull suspicious passengers aside for further investigation. Something about the passenger’s documents, story, or behavior has tipped off the officer that something isn't right. Usually, the passenger is trying to get into Australia illegally with forged documents.

When the officer suspects that the passport is fake, they have a forgery export examine it under a microscope. The officer will also call an officer at the passenger’s consulate to verify the information. If there is no consulate, or it is off hours, the officers has to guess.

The techie side of me found this to be unacceptable. I find it amazing that here in 2005, with the Internet available to most anywhere on the planet, that a simple passport verification system has not been implemented.

How hard is it for a nation’s passport department to put the data from their passport files on a web server? Not hard at all. How hard is it for these same nations to put these servers on a private intranet, or VPN on the Internet? Again, not hard at all. They should be able to do the whole thing in a week.

Then all the Australian immigration officer has to do is log on to the passport holder’s national passport database website and enter the passport number. The web server will return a web page with the same information that should be on the passport the officer is holding.

Simple as that!

To make things ever more efficient, the airlines could forward a list of passports to the destination’s immigration department. They could pre-pull the records of the passengers and make decisions while the passengers are still in the air. They will have hours to review the list, compare them against warrants and other watch lists, and do their job right instead of making snap decisions after the passenger arrives.

Other Benefits:

• If someone arrives with a fake or altered passport, it will not match the information of the passport issuer's database. This will kill the fake passport market since the passport can be authenticated by the issuer, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, anywhere on the planet, within seconds.
• If you loose your passport while travelling, it will make it much easier to have a host nation issues a tempory passport based on the data provided. Just like American Express issues temporary replacement credit cards on the spot. They then issue a real replacement that arrives at your home address a couple of weeks later.
• The system can also be used by immigration services to analyze visa requests before travelling. This can eliminate the process of having to mail your passport off to an embassy and hope you get it back. The request should be able to be processed online.

How about this idea? If the server uses XML instead of HTML, the data served by the issuer's server can be easily digitally processed by the client nation. This data can then be easily be forwarded as searches against other databases that would effect the decisions of the immigration department.