| From: |
maxwell Adeoy Adew [ profile ] |
| Subject: |
the world after 2020
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| Sent: |
Apr 18th, 2011 - 12:16:40 |
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In December 1933, 18 year old Patrick Leigh Fermor set off on his celebrated walk from Rotterdam to Constantinople. While carousing in Munich, he lost his passport, but not a problem. Next morning he popped into the local embassy and, while a secretary prepared a new one for him, he had tea and crumpets with the ambassador in front of a roaring fire. An hour later he was on his way, crossing border after border with neither Shengen nor any other visa to impede him. What a life!
Nearly eighty years later we moderns pride ourselves on how much more efficient we are than our forebears. However, the sad truth is that it can take weeks, if not months, to get a new passport, to say nothing of additional visas. With some passport offices it's impossible to contact a secretary by phone or E-mail with queries, let alone even dream of sharing a crumpet and a fireside chat with his excellency. But, you will no doubt retort, look how many people travel internationally today compared to PLF's time. And I will counter-retort, why don't we use the technology that's been on our desks for the best part of two decades?
For instance, you should be able to call up the national website, record your details, upload your photo, pay a fee by credit card and then download an electronic passport to a memory stick or a cell-phone, all before the kettle's even boiled for tea. In fact, I'd be quite happy to put my eye up close to the camera on my laptop so it can record the patterns on my iris for identification purposes. So what prevents governments from doing this? If it's a signature or a birth certificate they need I can scan one in and if they're worried about fraud, what checks do they really do on the signature on the back of a photo or of the so-called professional sponsors who signed their forms? Perhaps they do a search of a national citizens database; even so, I'll bet I could use the name and dates from an obituary in today's newspaper and their database won't even know that I'm supposed to be deceased.
As an experienced online media owner and daily recipient of hundreds of E-mails from dubious sources, I shouldn't really argue so strongly in favour of technology. No doubt the same problem would arise if the powers that be set up websites for unverified citizens to report crimes or even potholes in the roads, even though both were complete with detailed GPS coordinates. The sad fact of the matter is that, no matter what details visitors record when registering on websites or sending spam E-mails, the only time one even gets a glimmer of who the visitor really is comes when they pay for something by credit card.
Now there's a thought. Maybe all our deficit-reducing governments should abolish passports altogether, along with the expensive passport preparing secretaries and those surly passport stampers who welcome you to countries new with a scowl. They could cut huge costs by outsourcing the whole task to those notorious banks who brought them to this sorry plight in the first place. Arriving in a new country, we could then just swipe our credit card through a reader, enter a pin number, a code sent to our cell-phone and the name of our dog's maternal grandmother and, voila, the green light would flash and we would be in. Enterprising banks would even allow us to draw local currency from an ATM in the same swipe of the card. That's just the start; next we could look at replacing all the cards in our wallets with the ever so personal SIM card powering our cell-phone.
Now wouldn't that be wonderful and twenty first century efficient? In fact, it might even free up ambassadors to entertain us non-virtual citizens to tea and crumpets by the fireside at a real Tea Party as we pass by!
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