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Anoto: possible answer to part of the passport mess
By WDavidStephenson | June 28, 2007
My son and I were ensnared in the passport mess earlier this month when I belatedly remembered that we’d need them to join my wife at her conference in Vancouver.
Unlike many of the people who did what they were supposed to, and applied months in advance, we actually got ours (BTW, a shout-out to the great staff of Rep. Steve Lynch, who guided us through the process!). Believe it or not, if it’s close to when you’re leaving and you’re lucky enough to live in The Hub or one of the 10 or so other passport centers set up for expedited service, you’re actually better off going the day before your departure (putting aside, for a minute, the angst that can cause…), in which case the whole process, including a looong time standing in lines, can take as little as 7 hrs!
While we were grateful, it didn’t give me a great deal of confidence that our applications had been given a great deal of scrutiny.
At any rate, that got me 
thinking about a possible solution — one that requires display of the Stephenson Strategies Conflict-of-Interest Seal — because I’ve done a tad of new biz development work for these people in the past (not that, alas, I have a penny to show for it, and they don’t return my e-mails anymore, so this doesn’t look as if it’s going to be my cash cow….).
We filled out our applications online using one of those .pdf forms that you can fill out and print. Why the heck, you’re asking yourself, can’t you then pay by credit card and apply electronically??? Granted, you’d still have to appear in front of someone with the photos and proof of identification so there’d be some assurance you are who you say you are, but wouldn’t it both streamline the process and give Customs and Immigration more time to run a background check on you if you’d started the process electronically??
At any rate, many people apply at post offices or city halls, and there the process still uses an antiquated
fill-in-the-blanks paper form.
Here’s my suggestion: Anoto has a spiffy system that uses a goose-up pen that includes a CMOS chip beneath the nib and special paper with a microscopic dot pattern that lets users automatically capture and process handwritten text and illustrations in business forms. This is done by rapidly and reliably converting all handwritten information into digital format (I’m not kidding: it really works).
In this case, as soon as the passport form was completed, the contents would be digitally spirited off to D.C. in miliseconds. Kewl, or what?
If Customs would simply print the form on Anoto paper and distribute the pens to at least the largest cities and post offices, it would both speed the processing of the applications and give them more time for analysis, which would actually make the passport process more of a real security measure.
Technorati tags: homeland security DHS Department of Homeland Security War on Terror antiterrorism technology government IT web 2.0 Customs passports Customs and Immigration disaster planning Anoto
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