Got passports? Thoughts on identity resolution and high-volume data
You’ve no doubt heard about the recent overload of passport applications the US is experiencing. You know: about how the government recently announced that passengers traveling to Mexico, Canada and parts of the Caribbean suddenly needed a passport? And about how that created a backlog of about 500,000 unprocessed passport during the height of the summer travel season? Now Congress wants to allow some people without passports (but who have applied for one) back into the country, and DHS thinks it’s too risky (according to Mimi Hall at USA Today). In response, the State Department issued a special accommodation for some travelers, but that hasn’t mitigated anyone’s anger yet.
In addition, lots of folks are upset because, not only can the State Department not process the regular requests any time soon, but people who paid for expedited requests aren’t getting their passports any more quickly. People have lost money because of plane tickets and reservations and time, and everyone wants to know what the hold-up is. Well, the hold-up is pretty obviously the 500,000 unprocessed passports.
OK, that may sound a little self-fulfilling, a little circular in its logic, but consider what’s involved (not to mention at stake). Just one aspect of processing passports, or any other internationally recognized identification, means comparing disparate data-sets to one another, and that is a huge task. Put another way, and to quote Jeff Jonas, “Data Happens.”
Jonas explains that
“Every organization has an ocean of historical data and with each passing moment new data continues to stream in via one channel or another. Different streams lead to different silos and these silos are organized to serve different missions… rarely are any two silos alike.”
The recent influx of 500,000 new data pieces (each with a variety of subsets) into the passport office’s already vast data-stores seems like an almost unswimmable “ocean” of data, to borrow Jonas’ metaphor.
More importantly, it illustrates the desperate need for a fast, efficient means of resolving identity over multiple platforms. It is a complicated process that demands rigorous scrutiny. In the case of these passports, the pursuit of national security has to fit within citizens’ expectations of privacy, and that’s an incredibly tall order. It’s true that a rigorous data comparison can cause inconvenience and expenses, but consider the cost of a security breach. Which one of those costs are we more willing to pay?
[Update: A reader pointed out that we inadvertently said the DHS was issuing passports. He was right; we were wrong, and we've fixed the error here. Thanks, Matt.]
The U.S. Department of State issues passports, not DHS. DHS inspects those passports when U.S. citizens return to the U.S. from traveling abroad.