Posted: 5/26/2015 9:31:45 PM EDT
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Yes, it's a serious question. I was thinking about my own passport which identifies me as a U.S. citizen. You then have billions of other people around the world who have passports from their respective countries ID'ing them as citizens of those countries and so on. My understanding is that most all modern passports that are issued have some RFID stuff embedded in them which contains the same info as the ID page in your passport itself. This digital info is able to be read by many different countries who then check some database to verify that it's you. My question is, do all countries check the same database? Wouldn't they have to in order to, you know, catch criminals who might be fleeing? The other question I have is, what sort of validation can be run when a new record is created stating "John Doe is a legit citizen of Country X"? It would seem to me there's really no way for any sort of independent validation to be performed. In other words, Russia can't exactly confirm that when I was issued my passport that I'm truly a legit citizen of the U.S. - they're just trusting that the U.S. has done its homework and they accept it. Similarly, BenWa al-Jihad from Saudi Arabia or Kim Fuk-Dong of North Korea are in the same situation. The U.S. or any other allied nation can't really confirm this person is legit, can they? I also realize that spying has occurred for centuries before I was born and will continue to occur but if what I've posted above is true, what's even the point of a massive database to check records against if one country who is allowing someone to visit is just accepting of passport the person shows them and let's them move on? |
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While there may be millions, or even billions of valid passports, the number of criminals with passports should be rather small. Only those records would need to be transported to any sort of centralized database.
Government records and papers are usually accepted at face value, except by countries in conflict. |