69 new passport-processing centres will open over the next few weeks, and new applicants will all have to travel (at their own expense) to one of them to undergo an interview. Next year people will have to give fingerprints too - maybe you thought fingerprinting was for criminals, but no, in a surveillance society we are all turned into suspect individuals!

Buried within a story about how 10,000 fraudulent passport applications are granted every year (clearly timely propaganda to justify this new more troublesome passport procedure) are more details about how the passport interviews will work, and how bureacrats will snoop about in government & financial databases to pull together information about applicants' lives:

"IPS announced that adult first-time passport applicants would have to attend face-to-face interviews from May.

The IPS executive director, Bernard Herdan, said applicants would be expected to know answers from a pool of around 200 questions about their ancestry, financial history and previous addresses.

"We will not ask questions to which we don't know the answers," he said. "Before the interview takes place, we will have cross-checked that individual against various databases in order to uncover information about them."

The questions are intended to ensure that applicants are the people they claim to be and uncover any cases of identity fraud, he added.

Applicants will be asked who lives with them, whether they have a mortgage, where and when their parents were born and which bank accounts they hold, and will also face questions about the counter-signatory to their passport application."
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/terrorism/story/0,,2038442,00.html

"Take a look at the hoops through which new applicants will have to jump. Filling in the application form is just the start. Once the IPS has established that the applicant exists and is entitled to a passport, he will be invited to call a 24-hour advice line to arrange a face-to-face interview at one of 69 new centres (costing £180 million).

The "interrogation" (their word) will take between 10 and 20 minutes, though it will be conducted in a "non-threatening manner"; how very comforting. A list of up to 200 personal questions will be drawn on to authenticate people's identities.

And that is the nub of this intrusive and costly (£66 for a passport, plus the travel costs) new process. The Government is in fact installing the machinery for its misguided and ludicrously expensive system of ID cards "
 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=XVCMEP5ZRXCHHQFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/opinion/2007/03/21/dl2101.xml

Links to more news & information about ID cards, state surveillance & threats to privacy & freedom:
 http://del.icio.us/liverpool_defy_id/

 http://www.defy-id.org.uk |  http://www.no2id.net |  http://www.renewforfreedom.org