overview

studies

passports

visas

issues

travel

profiling

watch lists

ticketing

searches

Aust travel

abduction

refugees

deportation

borders

landmarks

related
Guides:

Privacy

Secrecy

Security
& Infocrime





related
Profiles:

Surveillance

Forgery &
Forensics

Identity
Theft

Australia
Card  

RFIDs

biometrics

     overview

This note considers passports and traveller surveillance schemes in discussing privacy, security and identity.

It covers -

• this orientation to travel documentation, highlighting key concepts and historical developments
• studies - points of entry to the literature
• passports - contemporary passport regimes, discussing standards, legal frameworks and history
• visas - questions about visas in Australia and elsewhere
• issues and futures - questions about authenticity, risks and developments such as the 'smart passport' (with biometric and RFID features)
• travel - restrictions on domestic and international travel in the digital era and in the past
• profiling - the basis of passenger profiling
• watch lists - questions about large scale traveller surveillance schemes, such as the TSA regime in the US
• ticketing - mechanisms such as the Oyster card used in major public transport networks
• searches - the legality of searching bags and body cavities, and copying laptops or other devices at border crossings
• Australian passport and travel data questions
• abduction - law and pactice regarding international child abduction, rendition of terrorism suspects and other matters
• refugees - a discussion of refugees in relation to passports and visas
• deportation - practice and policy in Australia and overseas
• borders - border identification and policing
• landmarks - in the development of passport regimes since the 1670s)

It supplements discussion of the Australia Card, privacy, identity theft, forgery, surveillance and other matters elsewhere on this site.

A complementary note considers rights of assembly and public protest, including the shape of monitoring in the industrial and post-industrial eras and questions about marches, pickets and other gatherings in Australia

     introduction

Passports - official certification of identity and authorisation of movement - provide individuals with the credentials for participation in the "economic, social and political dimensions of society". The absence of those credentials, or identification as a member of a stigmatised group, can conversely facilitate exclusion and even extermination.

1990s forecasts that digital technology would result in rapid demise of the state (eg Negroponte's forecast that it would evaporate like a mothball) and massive reductions in travel, with passports either disappearing or becoming irrelevant as borders dissolve, now seem deliciously utopian.

Passports and associated travel documentation have instead survived. They form an integral part of ambitious schemes for tracking terrorists and other offenders, with the documentation being strengthened through inclusion of biometric information in digital formats and communication mechanisms such as RFID tags that facilitate systematic capture of data by networks that increasingly extend beyond national borders.

     documents and databases

A passport is an official travel document that -

• allows an individual to leave and return to his/her country of citizenship and to facilitate travel from one country to another
• is issued by official sources and clearly "evidences the officially accepted identity and nationality of the bearer"
• is dependent for validity on the issuing government vouching for the person named in the document
• is also dependent on other governments recognising the issuing government (eg Saudi Arabia does not recognise the state of Israel and Israeli passports)

A visa is a corresponding official document that authorises the bearer to enter a particular country, generally on a short-term basis and subject to specific conditions (eg not engaging in paid employment during a visit).

Passenger cards are independent of passports, typically being used to gather information for immigration management, quarantine and statistical purposes. They relate to a specific departure or arrival; they are not borne by travellers on successive journeys.

Passports are issued under national law, generally for a period of ten years or less. Their use is subject to restrictions imposed by the issuing nation, with some jurisdictions accordingly requiring adherence to particular doctrines.

International law has recognised a range of special travel documents, notably

• the passeport diplomatique issued to diplomatic personnel (recognising the status of the individuals and accompaniments such as diplomatic pouches for the transmission of confidential communications), consistent with the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR)
• passports issued to government officials travelling on official business but without diplomatic protection
• and temporary documentation for refugees (such as the international Nansen Passport, named after the Arctic explorer and humanitarian).

Information from those documents - and more recently from non-government sources such as travel reservation systems and personal credit reference files - has increasingly been used in the construction of networked databases. Operation of those databases often involves international sharing of information, justified on the grounds of international/domestic security and public health.

Collection, mining, distribution and disposal of that data poses a range of privacy, governance, security and other concerns. They include the adequacy of global and national data protection rules, problems with the identification and therefore correction of faulty data, and uncertainty the performance of datamatching schemes in detection of terrorists.

     assembly

Human rights also encompass freedom of assembly, in essence the right to meet with groups and individuals.

As discussed elsewhere in this site, that right has often been curtailed - whether through explicit restrictions (eg the Napoleonic Code's prohibition on unauthorised 'meetings' of more than twenty people) or through covert and overt monitoring by participants and surveillance devices.

     global frameworks

Passports are issued under national law, with states assuming - correctly or otherwise - that their documentation will be recognised and respected.

There are no mandatory global specifications for international identity documents, although in practice most nations respect standards articulated by two United Nations agencies - the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) - and embodying broad international agreements.

Standards for the generation and exchange of transaction information - transport/accommodation bookings and payments, in particular involving large scale computerised reservation systems (CRS) - has involved private consortia and industry associations such as the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).

Strengthening of those document and data standards has been driven by the advanced economies. It has been reinforced through entry requirements set by leading states such as the US, which have a disproportionate influence in the global community because most international travel involves their nationals.

Standard-setting by the ICAO can be traced to the 1944 'Chicago Convention' on international civil aviation, which sought broad consistency in cross-border travel documentation that included passports, visas, health declarations and passenger cards. In 1980 the ICAO's Document 9303 established a standard for machine-readable passports, with all advanced economies thereafter upgrading their passport formats through inclusion of core information for capture using optical character recognition (OCR technology).

The ICAO has recently promoted development of 'smart passports'. The expectation is that biometric information will be held on a chip in each passport, with access using RFID technology. The intention is facilitate authentication of individual passports and reduce processing costs when travellers cross borders. The ease with which data can be captured also facilitates surveillance by government agencies and data matching as the basis of the invisible 'electronic border'.

That monitoring and analysis is increasingly leveraging a systematic exchange of information between databases maintained by different nations, by 'agents' such as airlines and by international law enforcement bodies.

The corporate history of the ILO, which predates the ICAO, has resulted in international agreements about the identification of seafarers. As of 2003 some 1.3 million seafarer cards were in use, well under the estimated 380 million passports in existence at that time.

The ILO and International Maritime Organization have moved to emulate the ICAO, with the 2003 international convention on seafarers identity encouraging adoption of more detailed (and readily authenticated) identity documentation.

     early history

Official travel documents such as passports have historically embodied the ambitions, capacities and preoccupations of the state.

Absolutist regimes in early modern Europe used passports to control the movement of their people, in some instances to authorise places of residence. Those regimes also engaged in searching of people and their possessions at border crossings, particularly because customs dues were a major source of government funds in eras before establishment of universal taxation. The 'steam age' saw a relaxation of formalities, arguably inversely proportional to the bureaucratisation of society and the growth of government administrative capacities.

Increased reliance on passports after 1941 to bind nations and manage visitors was reflected international agreements about document standards, although agreement about the treatment of the people identified by those documents – or seeking them – was less meaningful. Passport forgery and fraud has kept pace with technological advances, in a progression from one-off manuscripts to artefacts that are primarily aimed at transferring information to networked databases representing an electronic border against terrorists, drug traffickers and other offenders.

Early modern theorists of the state grappled with questions of borders, responsibility and social relationships. The 1557 treatise De Indis Noviter Inventis by Francisco de Vitoria (sometimes characterised as the father of international law) for example identified the jus communicationis – the natural right of communications between peoples and individuals.

He argued that

It was permissible from the beginning of the world (when everything was in common) for anyone to set forth and travel where he could. To keep certain people out of the city or provinces as being enemies, or to expel them when they are already there, are acts of war … it is unlawful to banish strangers who have committed no fault.

The emergence of passports in Western economies dates from around 1700, with Louis XIV of France issuing an edict in 1672 prohibiting departure of his subjects or entry of foreigners without an official letter of authorisation. Contemporary theorists of the well-ordered state may have envisaged a sort of paper Berlin Wall but in practice most borders were distinctly permeable and, as a sequence of high profile impostures demonstrated, lettres de passage were not an effective certification of identity.

A few generations later Peter the Great reformed the tsarist passport system, with guards providing a cordon sanitaire on the borders and internal passports seeking to restrict unapproved movement within the empire while providing a basis for taxation, labour and military service obligations. An 1807 law for example ordered all Jews to settle in the cities, with residence depending on gaining an internal passport; passport reforms in 1862 allowed Jews to travel outside cities and remain in rural locations for a short time for commercial purposes although permanent settlement was absolutely forbidden.

Expansion of bureaucracies after the Napoleonic wars saw codification of passport practice in advanced economies, with an emphasis on identification and authorisation of government officials (particularly diplomats) and businessmen. Most passports were for a specific journey (albeit one that was often vaguely described and might extend over several years), in a letter format with a rudimentary description of physical features and handwritten endorsement by an attaché or consul representing the country to be visited.

The expansion of international travel from the 1830s - driven by economic growth, the steam engine and telegraph - was reflected in winding-back of passport requirements in several countries. Britain had abolished a requirement to present a passport in 1815, followed by France in 1861. They did not disappear altogether; the US State Department for example issued over 369,844 passports between 1877 and 1909.

The number of passports in use across the world during that period is unknown; some academics such as John Torpey suggest that much international travel did not involve presentation or verification of passports.

Stefan Zweig's nostalgic 1943 memoir The World of Yesterday thus lamented that

There were no passports, no visas and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I travelled from Europe to India and America without a passport and without having seen one. ...[After 1914] the humiliations that once had been devised with criminals alone in mind were imposed upon the traveller, before and during every journey.

The forty years prior to 1914 were the first instance of what Kenichi Ohmae welcomed in 1990 as the "borderless world", with the emergence of mass tourism, ready movement across many frontiers in both hemispheres and free trade enjoying the same status it has had since the 1980s. Some observers have attributed that waning of passports in the belle époque to liberal government conceptualisation of the state, with borders properly involving quarantine rather than restrictions on the passage of ideas, people and commodities.

Others suggest that ideology was less important than bureaucratic problems, with the steam train resulting in bottlenecks as border officials sought to ascertain the validity of differing identity documents. Timely verification was inhibited by the lack of international standards and the proliferation of access points, in contrast to the 20th century where most air travellers enter/depart through a handful of airports.

As an explanation the 'bureaucratic bottleneck' is less than wholly convincing, given the effectiveness with which many states built postal networks, the development of bilateral/multilateral agreements that loosened passport formalities and maintenance of ethnic or other immigration quotas.

     in the age of bombs and barbed wire

Restrictions were reintroduced after the outbreak of war in 1914, often being strengthened in the 1920s as new states sought to define their national identity and displaced populations moved between countries and continents.

The new generation of passports - pocket-sized - typically comprised a softbound booklet of several pages that featured the subject's basic details (eg name, date and place of birth) and photograph, a physical description of varying exactitude, a unique serial number, the nation's insignia and a rubric of suitable pomposity.

The League of Nations, predecessor of today's UN, convened an international conference in 1920 that resulted in standard passport and visa formats for all signatory States, including uniform provisions regarding their content, layout, validity and fees. It was reflected in a range of national legislation, with the US Immigration Act of 1924 for example establishing immigration quotas and requiring all arriving aliens to present a visa.

A follow-up League conference in 1926 established additional international specifications for the standard passport format. The League had less success with protection of stateless people, despite humanitarian measures such as the Nansen Passport, and those within totalitarian states.

That was illustrated during the first stages of the Holocaust, with the German government for example restricting access by its Jewish nationals in 1937 and then confiscating their passports in the following year. Few people living in the Soviet empire were able to obtain passports until 1991.

The outbreak of global war in 1939 saw a strengthening of visa and registration requirements, such as the Aliens Registration Act 1939 and National Registration Act 1939 in Australia and the Alien Registration Receipt Card (Green Card) under the US Alien Registration Act of 1940.

The 1944 Chicago conference noted above led to establishment of the ICAO in 1946 as an agency of the United Nations with a similar status to that of the ITU, and creation of IATA in 1945 as the successor to the International  Air Traffic Association founded in the Hague in 1919.

Prior to late 2001 travel records received little systematic attention from national security and police agencies or from data protection agencies and privacy advocates, particularly outside the EU. Travel data was essentially regarded as a category of commercial transaction information. Individual records were perceived as being of little ongoing interest for government agencies and few observers identified a need for special privacy protection, in contrast to treatment of health services information, financial records and even information about library borrowing and video rentals.








   next page (studies)