Print Edition: April 5, 2008
No passport? Then no perch for you!
"Drop those perch and reach for the sky!" This may sound like an odd expression, but thanks to your federal government it’s a refrain that may be heard on the great lakes this fishing season. Why? Because if you’re a fisherman without passport you may be in violation of federal law, thanks to those diligent agents at the Homeland Security Department.
This came to light last week when USA Today reported: "When the 2008 charter season begins next month, U.S. citizens paying to fish on Lake Erie will have to bring either a passport or two other IDs if they plan to cross the northern border's invisible watery line (with Canada). When they get back to shore in the USA, they'll have to drive to a local government reporting station and pose for pictures. The Homeland Security Department intends to enforce new border security rules — largely focused on those coming into the country by land and air — on fishermen re-entering the country.
Lest you think this only might affect downstaters, think again. Northern Michigan anglers are also caught in the net if they plan to fish the upper reaches of Lake Huron (because the feds will be frisking fishermen on all of the great lakes in hopes of nabbing terrorists).
If you think this is a waste of taxpayer money, you are not alone. After all, this is the same agency who can’t secure the Mexican border and who does not have enough agents to do even cursory inspections in our nation’s ports. Now they’re going to waste time, personnel and money trying to track down perch fishermen in 15-foot boats bobbing somewhere on the vast reaches of Lake Huron?
As Detroit Free Press outdoors writer Eric Sharp observes: "It's what you'd expect from the government that gave us the recovery plan for Hurricane Katrina: impractical, unenforceable, inconvenient, infuriating and expensive."
Sharp also notes: "It's the kind of goofy rules you'd expect from cubicle denizens who know little about the situation for which they are making the rules, bureaucrats who probably have never seen a fishing boat, never mind gone fishing…If a group of anglers merely leaves the United States, motors into Canadian waters and then comes back, what does checking in do to make us safer? And if the boaters are terrorists or people smugglers who make an illegal landing in Canada, do you think they will check in upon returning? Unless the border patrol is prepared to track the movements of a significant percentage of the boats on our waters, this latest plan is simply another government boondoggle."
Okay, so now you’re shaking your head as you visualize more of your tax dollars going down the drain in yet another infuriating flush, but please allow me to add to your consternation. To wit, there’s a good chance that even if fishermen do carry passports, those documents may actually make the country less secure.
An investigation by the Washington Times has found that our government is actually outsourcing passport printing to foreign countries. Our own passports are not even being printed in our own country!
Says the Times: "The United States has outsourced the manufacturing of its electronic passports to overseas companies — including one in Thailand that was victimized by Chinese espionage."
To make matters worse, "The Government Printing Office's decision to export the work has proved lucrative, allowing the agency to book more than $100 million in recent profits by charging the State Department more money for passports than it actually costs to make them. The profits have raised questions both inside the agency and in Congress because the law that created GPO as the federal government's official printer explicitly requires the agency to break even by charging only enough to recover its costs. Lawmakers said they were alarmed by The Times' findings and plan to investigate why U.S. companies weren't used to produce the passports, one of the crown jewels of American border security. ‘I am not only troubled that there may be serious security concerns with the new passport production system, but also that GPO officials may have been profiting from producing them,’ said Rep. John D. Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee."
It gets even better. The passports have a tiny computer chip in them. Suppliers include companies in Germany, Israel and the Netherlands. The company in the Netherlands, Smartrac, then outsources the outsourcing to Thailand for further manufacturing.
About Thailand, Smartrac itself has stated in its annual report: "The stop in Thailand raises its own security concerns. The Southeast Asian country has battled social instability and terror threats. Anti-government groups backed by Islamists, including al Qaeda, have carried out attacks in southern Thailand and the Thai military took over in a coup in September 2006…in a worst-case scenario, social unrest in Thailand could lead to a halt in production." The Times investigation also points out, "Smartrac divulged in an October 2007 court filing in The Hague that China had stolen its patented technology for e-passport chips, raising additional questions about the security of America's e-passports."
So there you have it, one government agency (the GPO) outsourcing passport production to unsecure foreign locations so they can turn a profit by cheating another government agency (State Department). The Chinese have already stolen the technology, so any claims by the federal government about the security of the passports produced is just plain laughable.
Meanwhile, some poor angler is going to get his bobber jerked by customs officials because he tossed a line into Canadian waters and didn’t fax an update to the Homeland Security Department. This, even though information contained in the angler’s passport is already in the hands of the Chinese. Welcome to Darth Cheney’s secure America.
More questions. This week we also found out that scientists have a way to train fish to harvest themselves. Scientists play a tone signal and when the fish hear it they jump into nets. So, you might have a case where a boater, cruising along minding his own business, gets a cell phone call and hearing the ring tone a Canadian perch leaps into the boat. Is that a crime? Is it a felony for the boater or the perch? Are all charges dropped if either has a Chinese passport?
Jim Neff is a local columnist. Comments to neffzone@gmail.com. Read Neff Zone columns online at www.neffzone.com/cadillacnews.
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