Issuing passports is one of those things that’s pretty close to the core of what we ask our national government to do. Yet the government is not doing all that great a job.

One brewing fiasco is a thing called the “e-passport.” This is a passport with a radio chip in it, used to share information from the passport over the airways.

The original e-passport plan would have let the radio chip report our identity information to anyone with the right kind of chip reader. They redesigned it, so now it must be unlocked with a digital “key.” (This negated any time-savings you might get from transmitting your identity ahead to the Customs and Border Control agent when you cross the border.)

But the problems didn’t end there. Apparently, the e-passport is still insecure.

Adam Laurie and Jeroen van Beek, at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, showed the Business Technology Blog how to capture and change information stored on chips included in new passports from many countries. . . . Laurie showed us his son’s British passport, in which he embedded a chip that displays Osama Bin Laden’s photograph. The passports have a key needed to access the electronic information, but it is taken from information found in the passport like the date of birth. Laurie was able in about four hours to decipher the key and use an RFID scanner to steal the digital information from a passport contained in a sealed envelope.

One is hard-pressed to find what Congress is doing to oversee things. One bill is H.R. 5752, introduced in April, which focuses on the fact some part of the U.S. passport manufacturing process happens in Thailand. The bill may have been introduced because of the security issues, or as a favor to federal government employees’ unions.

The security of passport isn’t the only thing. Recently, the government increased the documentation requirements for Americans returning from nearby countries - a program called the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. Well, when the time came for the documentation requirement to go into effect, there was a rush on the passport offices, and the State Department fell behind.

H.R. 2745 is called the “Passport and Travel Cost Reimbursement Act of 2007.” It proposes to reimburse the passport processing fees and international travel costs of people who didn’t get their passports processed and so weren’t able to travel.

On the page for that bill, commenter Patty Meeks says, “Not only did my daughter and I experience financial loss, but my daughter’s senior trip was ruined. She will remember that for the rest of her life.” She notes that the bill hasn’t even moved out of subcommittee. Maybe the bill was just for show and not a real effort to make things right.

H.R. 4186 would repeal the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. Maybe it’s a waste of everyone’s time to demand proof of citizenship from American high school seniors returning from Canada, Mexico, or the Carribean.

These are just a couple of the issues floating around passports. Below are the current votes on the bills mentioned here.

H.R. 5752 is the bill about passport manufacturing in Thailand.

H.R. 2745 is the Passport and Travel Cost Reimbursement Act.

And H.R. 4186 would repeal the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative.

Below is the voting on all three. Click to vote, comment, learn more, or edit the wiki articles on the bills.