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Subject: [fyi-l] NYTimes.com Article: New Passport Rules Are Put Off by
U.S.


This article from NYTimes.com

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New Passport Rules Are Put Off by U.S.

September 9, 2003
 By PHILIP SHENON






WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - The Bush administration has decided
to postpone enforcement of new antiterrorism regulations
that had threatened to block millions of Western Europeans
and citizens of other developed nations from traveling to
the United States unless they obtained new, computer-coded
passports, senior administration officials said today.

They said the new passport rules, which were supposed to
take effect on Oct. 1 and which were mandated by Congress
as an antiterrorism measure, will not be enforced until
October 2004.

The rules will require that citizens of 27 countries who do
not usually require visas to visit the United States - most
of them in Western Europe, as well as Japan, Australia, New
Zealand, Singapore and Brunei - carry passports with text
that can be read by computerized scanners at airports and
other American border stations.

The rules, arising from the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks,
were intended to stop terrorists from trying to use false
passports to enter the United States and make it easier for
officials to gather information on people arriving here.

Administration officials said the State Department decided
to delay implementation of the rules by more than a year
because of the chaos that could have resulted next month
when travelers unaware of the new rules tried to enter the
United State with old-style passports.

In some Western European countries, including France and
Spain, more than a third of all passports in circulation do
not have so-called machine-readable features. The majority
of passports from Switzerland are not machine-readable.

Officials said the decision was communicated on Friday to
American embassies representing the United States in 26 of
the 27 countries, with the embassies instructed to inform
the foreign governments that their citizens could be
exempted from the new passport rules until October 2004 so
long as the governments provide assurances that the
machine-readable passports will readily available by then.

The countries are being required to provide a written
request to the State Department of their desire to have
their citizens exempted from the new rules until next year.


The rules are not being waived for Belgium, where the
requirement for machine-readable passports is already being
enforced because of concern about passport security there.

American officials said the move to postpone enforcement
of the rules followed a vigorous debate between the State
Department, where senior officials felt that enforcement of
the rules had to be delayed to avoid turmoil for foreign
travelers, and the Department of Homeland Security, where
officials believed that the new passport rules were a
valuable antiterrorist tool and needed to be enforced as
quickly as possible.

The officials said the Department of Homeland Security
agreed to the one-year waiver, but only after insisting
that the foreign governments provide written assurances of
their commitment to ending passport fraud and to
introducing machine-readable passports.

"I wouldn't characterize it as State Department versus
Homeland Security, but it's been a subject of some
discussion," a State Department official said.

An official at the Department of Homeland Security said,
"We're pleased to have reached an agreement on a policy
that serves all needs, especially our needs in combatting
terrorism."

A copy of the cable sent by the State Department to the
American embassies last week was provided to The New York
Times.

While the cable suggests that Secretary of State Colin L.
Powell has not made a final decision to waive the Oct. 1
deadline for the new passports - it says only that Mr.
Powell "is prepared to exercise his authority to grant a
limited waiver" - administration officials said the
decision had been made.

The decision to delay enforcement of the new passport rules
will be welcomed by the travel industry, which says it has
been devastated by antiterrorism policies adopted by the
Bush administration that have discouraged many foreign
travelers from visiting the United States.

People from countries that participate in the State
Department's visa waiver program are allowed to travel to
the United States for tourism or business for 90 days or
less without obtaining a visa.

In entering the visa waiver program, the countries are
required to certify that they are committed to issuing only
machine-readable passports.

In several countries, including Australia, Britain and
Japan, most passports in circulation are already
machine-readable.

American passports are also machine-readable, with
passenger information encoded in two lines of text at the
bottom of plastic-coated inner cover.

The 27 countries in the visa-waiver program face another
daunting deadline in October 2004, when they will be
required by the United States to issue passports with
computer chips containing facial recognition data.

Travelers from those countries with passports issued before
the October 2004 deadline will still be allowed to travel
to the United States without visas as long as their
governments have begun a so-called biometric identification
program.

Privacy advocates in the United States and overseas have
expressed dismay at the demands being made by the
administration over the immigration policies of some of its
closest allies.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/09/politics/09PASS.html?ex=1064128398&ei=1&en
=f2972d33c88c2260


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