Stuff You Should Know - How Passports Work

Episode Date: October 27, 2015

The concept of passports - that people should enjoy protected freedom of movement - is an ancient one. It wasn't until WWI that they became universal. Learn all about this overlooked, important document. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Noel, the Autumn of Noel continues.

Yeah, Autumn of Noel, that's a good album title. Yeah, that's, I get royalties from it if anyone uses it. I think that we should entitle this. Passports colon, go to sleep now. Man, I know. This is one of the ones that gets chalked up in the column of, well, we've got to explain everything.

Yeah, it's okay. Oh yeah. I don't want to talk down before we start. Right. It's not scintillating. We're supposed to be enticing people who aren't actually kind of chasing them off. Now, I think this file's under informational,

helpful informational podcasts. There you go. We're not gonna blow your mind with the coolest stories on earth, but you're gonna know how to get a passport. Yes, you are, especially if you live in the United States. Yeah.

All right, well, let's start with the name, Chuck. You know, there's a great debate over what passport the word comes from. Oh yeah? Yeah, it depends on whether you are British or a Francophile. Okay. In British, it means quite literally what it sounds like.

It allows passage through a port, like we're ship docks. Right. You come in, say, here are my papers. This is a passport. Let me pass. If you're French, port P-O-R-T-E means gate or door. Oh. So you would be allowed passage through the gates of a city.

Okay. Never been settled. No one knows exactly which one's correct, but it's probably one of those two that the word comes from. It's never been settled because they quit arguing about it. Yeah, there's like, it doesn't matter.

Who cares? But it does underscore the fact that passports are quite old, actually. Yeah, you dug up this article from The Guardian, a brief history of the passport, which, although it's kind of interesting, back even in biblical times, they had things that were like passports.

They obviously didn't call them passports. But in the book of Nehemiah, very underrated. I'd never even heard of it. Had you? Yeah, of course. I used to have them all memorized. You had the book of Nehemiah? No, no, no.

All the books of the Bible memorized. I can still say I'm up through a certain point. Nice. And then I just forget and then start shaking. Is Nehemiah included in what you can remember? No. Okay, good. I think I go up through like judges.

Yeah. And then I forget. Did you alphabetically? No, just in order. Oh, okay. I could start rallying them off. That's okay, that's all right. Yeah, I don't think we need to go there.

And Nehemiah, though, there was a prophet working as the Royal Cupbearer and basically had to travel to Judah and said, I need some help, King, so I don't get, I guess, drawn and quartered, which they probably didn't even do back then. So can I get safe passage? And that was sort of the earliest idea of a government sort of agency saying, please allow this person

to pass into your town. Yeah, no molestar. No molestar. Don't touch this guy, just leave him alone. He's got my protection. I will bring the full force of my kingdom down upon you. That's right. This actually ties in with our episode

on diplomatic immunity. It's basically the same thing. Sure. But so yeah, this idea of getting some sort of protection to travel abroad, it's pretty old. In early medieval and then up until late medieval Europe, there is this idea that people should have a freedom of movement, right?

King John, same guy from the Magna Carta, he was the first to, at least in Europe, to enshrine the idea of freedom of movement, that you should be able to leave your homeland, go somewhere for business or pleasure or whatever, and then come back to your homeland without any real problems. It shouldn't be a big deal.

You shouldn't be trapped in your homeland. You shouldn't be excluded from your homeland. You should be able to move back and forth. And since then, it's been considered something of a universal human right, this freedom of movement. You'd think so. And while, in fact, in the UN's universal declaration of human rights that came after World War II,

it's enshrined in there as well, freedom of movement. Pretty neat. It is pretty neat. But part of that is this idea that you have some sort of papers that says, this is a citizen of our country. Please give them, please treat them well. And in fact, well, I don't know about that,

but at least allow them to come and go. Right, there you go. In fact, in our own US passport, still, something a lot of people probably don't even read, there in lies the important statement that says that still. Like, please allow the citizen, I don't even think it says please. It says no molestar.

Just no molestar. Let's see who plays. It's very important. Right. In Jolly Old England, I thought this is pretty interesting. From the 1794 on, the office of the Secretary of State took over passport issuance.

The home office, right? It just says the office of Secretary of State. I think it's the home office. OK. And they have every passport since 1794 still on record. Yeah. It's pretty awesome. Yeah.

Or frightening, depending on where you're coming from. I saw another thing about British passports. The photos have evolved over time. Like, it used to be they were just like, Ed, just make sure you're in the photo. Sure. So like, Sarrath or Conan Doyle has a photo of himself with his family and their dog.

Really? On his old passport. Yes. Over time, though, as we'll see, there's definitely strict regulations about what you can and can't use for your passport photo. Yeah. And also in England, they used to British passports

had descriptions as well. So a lot of people didn't like this. It would have things like big nose, prominent eight head. BDIs. BDIs. And eventually they're like, maybe we should just let the photo do the talking. Right.

So about the 1860s, Europe said, you know what? Tech with this. This is a pain. We don't want to check everybody's papers. Let's just do away with passports. And they were fine with that. America went the exact opposite way. Up until about the Civil War, it was pretty easy to come

and go into the United States without any kind of papers whatsoever. But then, apparently, because they were worried about, well, they wanted to keep track of who was coming into America and who was going. And that's a really good way to do it. And freed slaves.

Right, is to require documentation for that kind of international travel. So America started its passport requirements around then. And then finally, when World War I came, everybody started using passports. Yeah, that seemed like the point where the whole world said, let's really keep track of this. Yeah, and they used to be pretty cumbersome.

I think that the United States passport was like an 11 by 18 inch document. Yeah, that's a biggie. Yeah, this was taken from a book that you found called The Passport in America by Craig Robertson. And this dude really did his homework. He did. And there was even a direct quote from somebody

in the 19th century that said, no pocket of any sex would tolerate them. No, they were just too big. So that was the Yelp review of passports. Right, exactly. I came for this in my pocket. Nobody could. So then 1926 came around, and the United States

dropped it down to about the standard three by five. And that became the trend around the world. And everything interesting about passports is just coming off. No, that's not true. I love that England called theirs old blue for a long time. Yeah, apparently it was very beloved. And then they moved over to Burgundy.

And I was like, OK. Old Burgundy. I guess it's fine. All right, should we take a break here? Why not? All right, let's take a break, and we'll get back to the scintillating details of passports. OK.

On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life,

step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, we're back with Passports. Welcome back to Passport Talk. We should do a whole series on it. So in the US, if you are issued, you're issued a passport from a number of places, the State Department.

Well, the State Department issues them. Well, they get routed through there for sure. Right, you can apply at different places. Yeah, so there's 27 passport agencies now in all 50 states. But you don't have to go to a passport agency. No, you don't unless you want it really quickly. That's only about a week quicker. It depends.

We'll talk about, we'll get to that. Yeah. But yeah, most people just go to the post office. You can go to the post office, you can go to a court. There are other authorities around. If you look up, you can apply for your passport. You can apply at home, like print it out yourself. What's the form?

DS stroke 11? I think that is it. That's the one. Yeah, you can print it out at home. But the thing is, is you're going to need to, we should say, there's really two big circumstances that will change all this stuff. If this is your first passport, you

can print it out at home all day long. You're going to have to go somewhere to show up in person to apply. That's right. They want to see you. They want to verify you are who you are. They want to smell you. Yes, they want to take in your scent.

Sure. And so your first passport, you have to jump through a little bit of hoops. We should say, however, this is not difficult stuff. No, no. And there's really no excuse whatsoever for you to not have a passport. No, I think when you reach a certain age,

it's good to have just in case. It's good for 10 years if you're over 18. Right. 16, I think. Oh, is it 16? Yeah, I think so. All right, well, 10 years is a long time. Sure.

And we'll get into trying to get it one quick like. But you can save yourself a lot of money. And a lot of trouble. And a lot of stress if you just say, go ahead and get my passport in case you ever need to leave the country in a hurry or for fun. Sure. And cost now is for first time, first timers,

it's $135 for an adult, 105 for a child. If you renew your passport, which is a little bit of a misnomer because they say you can't renew a passport, you can't renew it in that you keep your same passport. You get a new one. But if you have a previous passport, you can get it renewed. It'll just be a new one.

And it's cheaper. Right, yeah. So the first time you go to apply for a passport, you're going to fill out the form. What is it, the DS-11? DS-11. And you're going to take it down there with some proof of identity.

And you are going to sign it in front of the person at the post office or the clerk of court, wherever. Yeah, don't sign it at home. No, no. And then they're going to take all of your stuff. And then you will get a passport in the mail. After that, you can fill out a totally different form, pay less money, and just mail your old passport in.

And they'll send you a new one. Yeah, along with the old one, which is kind of neat if you like a keepsake. Yeah, what I can say is don't tear pages out of your passport as keepsakes. Because I know someone who ended up on a watch list by doing that. No way.

Wow, a family member, actually. Really? Yeah, just wanting to like, hey, this was a special trip. Let me keep this page. Big no-no. Yeah, apparently you could be prosecuted for mutilating your passport.

Yes, you can. That's how they put it. So don't worry. They'll mail you back your old passport if you just want to hang on. And I don't know if it's changed. When I was doing my traveling abroad in the 90s, I didn't even get stamped in every country.

So it's not like I had a passport full of amazing, memorable stamps. I think about half the country has even bothered stamping it. They may be more strict on it now. I don't know. Do you always get stamps? I mean, here, there, most of the time.

OK, but not always. Yeah, I've never figured out what the deal is, why they would or wouldn't stamp. It seems like it literally comes down to, like, do I feel like doing this with my hand? Yeah, that's the impression I have as well. But I mean, that seems like a serious lack of, you know? Standardization, maybe?

Sure, yeah. I guess, yeah, there's something wrong with that, I think. So if you want to go abroad, you should do this a few months ahead of time just to take all the stress out of it. You're going to get your passport. It usually takes a couple of weeks, but you don't want to chance anything.

No, no. Just normally, just using all the normal channels, going to the post office, not paying for any kind of expedited service, the State Department estimates you should get your passport from the time of your application about four to six weeks. Yeah, but it never takes that long. But again, it shouldn't, but it could.

It could. That's the worst case scenario, which is what they tell you. Yeah. So Uncle Chuck will tell you, it'll take a couple of weeks. But again, don't risk that. No, and there's actually a fairly recent history shows us that you really shouldn't risk it. Back in 2007, something called the Western Hemisphere

Travel Initiative went into effect. And it used to be that you could get to Canada and Mexico and parts of the Caribbean with just your birth certificate and maybe a driver's license. That was totally fine. That kind of traveled through North America. In 2007, they said, no, if you're traveling by air, you have to have a passport, even if you're

coming from Mexico or Canada into the US. If you're traveling by land or by sea, you need to at least have a passport card, which they created, which is about half price. This caused a huge run on passports in 2007. And the backlog suddenly went to like a 15-week wait, which was a real headache for a lot of people who'd waited, assuming it was going to be four to six weeks.

And all of a sudden, it was 15 weeks. Well, if your travel was in that time, you were in big trouble, right? And now the State Department is warning, we're about to get to the 10-year anniversary of that. So if your passport's coming up for renewal, you may want to do it sooner than later, because that same backlog is going to come again

as people have to renew after 10 years. So if you were a chump before? Don't be a chump twice. Well, no, be prepared to be a chump again, almost. I guess, or else run out and do it right now. So the little card for first timers is 55 for adults and 40 for kids, which is a lot cheaper, and it fits in your wallet.

And I guess if you are in the US, you're like, I like to go to the Caribbean every now and then, or Mexico, and that's about it. Yeah, but that's just if you're going by land or sea. Yeah. If you're flying, you have to have a passport. Every single time. You should say that at least two more times.

If you're flying, you have to have a passport. That's three. I think we got it across. But like I said, you know yourself, you know what kind of travel you like to do. If you just say, I like to go on the occasional cruise. OK, see, that gets your little card. That's sea travel.

That's covered. I don't want anybody getting to customs being like, but Josh and Chuck said, and that's ruining their vacation. No, I think we've really hammered that. OK, I'm fine. Know yourself. Know your travel style. Get the card if the card is good for you.

Get old blue. Well, we don't call it old blue. No. The British call ours old blue, though. They name it every. And they name everything. Yeah, what's it, Burgundy now? Old Burgundy.

All right, so we're traveling abroad. By the way, you have a baby. Your baby's got to have a passport. Yeah, and I thought there would be some like exemption, but no, you got to get your baby photographed. Any live human has to have a passport, at least in the United States, but increasingly across the world, like passport laws

are becoming more and more standardized. Yeah, you know. All right, so we talked about applying in person. Avi, if it's your first passport, you have to do that. We already said that. If you lost or had your passport stolen, you have to go again in person. If your passport is expired and was issued more than 15 years

ago, you got to go again. Yep. And by the way, the reason they, I think when you're a kid, you have it only last so long because you change the way you look more. Right. Which makes sense. Yeah, they have no idea what you're

going to grow up to look like. It could look like a freak. They don't know. So is it every five years if you're? If under age 16, five years. And hey, if you're getting multiple passports before the age of 15, then lucky you, kid. If your passport is expired and was issued

when you were under 16, you got to go in person. Or if your name has changed, then you got to go in person. If your name has changed and you don't have any kind of legal document, showing the change name. You can send that in, right? Yeah, you can totally, you can change your name just by through the mail, actually, as long as you have a certified supporting document.

Here's what I thought was interesting. To prove your identity, if you don't have a certified birth certificate, you can actually still get a passport through a letter of no record. Basically a letter saying, this dude doesn't have a certified birth certificate for whatever reason. It starts out, you're not going to believe this.

Yeah. But get this. This guy doesn't have a birth certificate. I like that they take, there's an allowance for that though. Yeah, I think it's necessary. And this is different from a hospital birth certificate. The hospital actually reports the birth, and then the birth is recorded with the city or the county.

That's the birth certificate you want. But if your city or county lost it or whatever and can't find it, then they should issue you a letter of no documentation. That in and of itself isn't going to be enough for you to necessarily get a passport. You also want to find other stuff that supports the fact that you were in fact born. This is a great list.

You know? Yeah. A census record, where are you going to find that? A certificate of circumcision. Yeah, that's one. I mean, who's going to lie about that? Yeah, show them the certificate. Then I guess if they need further proof,

you could go into the back room. They're like, please step around and drop your pants. No, they wouldn't do that. Baptismal certificate? No, if they do do that, you should get a free passport. It may be even like a state. Like they give you a state. The state you're in, you just automatically own it for that.

Doctor's record of postnatal care, a family Bible record. I've never heard of that. I didn't even underline that. You didn't? No, that seems illegitimate. Like you could write anything in a family Bible. Is that what that means? I think so.

That sounds archaic. Baptismal certificates, another one? Then you want to bring in some proof of ID, like if your driver's license or military ID, government ID. Basically, you want to load up on anything you can, including a signature ID, and say, please, let me leave the country and come back. And there's actually a form called the DS slash 10A.

And it is a form that you can have a blood relative who's older than you. It's my favorite thing. It's an affidavit saying, yes, this person was born. I remember when he or she was born, because they're my favorite niece or nephew. And they are who they say they are. They don't even need to be related.

Oh, really? I thought it was a blood relative. Now, you just have to know you for two years. Oh, that's a different form. That's the form DS slash 71. Oh, I thought, what's yours again? DS slash 10A. Let's get it.

Let's get it straight. But they both do the same thing? They vouch for it. But one is a blood relative, and I think it holds more weight. Oh, OK. The DS 71 is where somebody who's known you for two years says, I vouch for this person. How long did you know me, Rob?

They've been, yeah, I could have vouched for him, I guess. Could he vouch for you? I guess, yeah. I'm sure we knew each other for longer than two years. But I mean, think about it. I think that's like the last resort. It's like this person has been posing as this person for at least two years, is with the form DS slash 71.

Yeah, he's my neighbor. He just suddenly showed up. I know that the older couple who lived in the house just suddenly didn't live there anymore, and this man did. He doesn't have an accent. That's weird. All right, so let's talk about the worst case scenario, which we were talking about, which is, oh, no,

I have to get to Bruges in Belgium tomorrow. OK. What do you do? Well, it depends on why you have to get there. If you have a family member who just fell down and hit their head, and is at death's doorstep, you have what the State Department considers to be a life and death circumstance.

That's right. You can go there and say, hey, this hospital in Bruges just sent me this fax that is my brother's medical records, and I have to go. And they will work with you. Yes. If you say, hey, just thought of going out of town at the last minute.

I booked a trip for tomorrow for fun, because I'm an idiot. So I need a passport. They'll actually work with you. Yeah, it's not going to be fun. No, and you're going to have to jump through some hoops. But you can conceivably get a passport within 24 hours or less, sometimes the same day. Yeah, you can go to a private agency

and pay anywhere from $180 to $300 to get a same day passport. Yes, that's real. Right. It's not like the back alley. This should do it. I saw one here in Atlanta. They have an office where for $295, you can get a passport in eight hours.

They'll go get you one. Wow. But that is, again, if you say just need it to be renewed or need pages added to it or something like that, if you have to do it in your first passport, you're going to have to do it yourself either way. And actually, you can save yourself those fees by simply making an appointment and going

to one of the regional offices if you're lucky enough to live in that city. True. And then you should be able to get it the same day, as long as you can prove that you need it within that time. Yeah, and if you pay the $60 rush fee. Yeah, because if you hire this private service, you're going to have to pay all the normal passport fees.

Including the rush fee. Plus, there, this private services fees of $300 on top of all of the other fees you'll have to pay. Exactly. All right, well, let's take a break and let's talk about the all-important passport photo after this. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out

the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen

crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Josh, this is kind of fun, too, because passport photos have very specific requirements. And you would think they would just be common sense, but, you know, some dummy might take their own passport photo, which you can do with, like, beats headphones

and a braved hat and sunglasses on. You're dumb, dumb. Especially if you mail that off and expect your passport to come back, you're going to get a letter of denial. No, instead, you have to be facing front. You want it to be mostly a headshot. It has to be a two inch by two inch photo. Yes.

And you need a duplicate of it. And your head has to take up one to one and three eighths inches of this photo. From the bottom of the chin to the top of the head. Exactly. You don't want anything covering your hair or your hairline. You don't want to be wearing sunglasses. But if, say, you wear a wig, or you wear glasses,

or you wear something that is a separate feature on your face, but you normally wear that, you would want to wear that in the photo. Yeah, they want it to look as much like you look every day. And that doesn't mean I wear my last chance garage hat. No, you couldn't. You would get denied. But I could say, I wear this almost every day.

And they'd say, sorry, you're denied. And they'd say, you're a grown man for God's sake. Why are you wearing a baseball cap? It's got to be in color these days. Didn't used to have to be. And they prefer a neutral expression, although you are allowed a slight smile. A little, maybe a Mona Lisa smile.

Yeah, tops. If you're going to Paris for the Tour de France finale, that's how it is. Well, let's say France. All right. You might be a little excited and smile a little bit, but keep it to yourself. Keep it tamped down forever.

Or you can, if you don't want to do it yourself, you're supposed to have a white background or tan background. You could go to Kinko's or someplace, or just Google passport photos. And there's plenty of places that aren't the photo booth. Yeah, which, again, technically, as long as it fit the criteria, they don't care if you got it done in a photo booth.

As long as you're following all of the standards. But it is a lot easy for you to go to just the drug store and say, I need passport photos. That's right. And the person taking your picture should know what to do. We've already talked about renewal, but that is DS stroke 82. If you want to download that sucker. And again, it is cheaper to renew.

And as long as you fit the other requirements, you can just send it right in and get it replaced. Right. Which is great. Right, so if you were to tear open your passport as of 2006 in the United States, you would, well, first of all, you'd be arrested, probably, which is nuts. But if you go and read page six, it

says that it's property of the US government. Yeah, you don't own it. No, and that if a US authority requests that you surrender it, you have to surrender it. That's right. Which we'll talk about in a second, because that's kind of a big deal. But if you tore it up and you would find an RFID chip that

makes your passport what's considered an e-passport. And that has all sorts of information. It has a duplicate of your photo. It has biometric information about you. And it makes it a lot harder to travel under a fake passport or forge a passport than it used to be. And that's radio frequency identifications, what that stands for.

Right. And the US gets a lot of credit for the e-passport, but it actually was introduced in Malaysia earlier. And another big feature that makes it difficult to forge is, well, a lot of different features, like special inks and different types of illustrations and threading and stuff like that. That was actually introduced by Nicaragua.

Yeah, theirs apparently is one of the most difficult documents to forge in the world. Yeah, I think it's become the standard. But they're the ones who started it actually. They started the trend. So I said that your passport is technically not yours. It's basically on loan from the government. This really irks a lot of people.

There's a couple of laws that have become proposed recently where one is if you owe the IRS $50,000 or more, you can have your passport revoked. Another is if you owe $5,000 or more in child support, you can have your passport revoked. And another one is if you're accused of associating with terrorist organizations, you can have your passport revoked.

Well, all three of those are meeting resistance by people who say, hey, man, there are ways for you, the US government, to track all the people you need to track without revoking passports. We don't like you having that power overtly written down in law. This is a right that dates back to the Magna Carta.

So let's just lay off of that. The US government says, shut up. We own your passports and you, by the way. So there is resistance to it, but I don't know how well it's being met. And this program of revoking passports among terrorists, people associated with terrorist organizations, have you read the drone papers from the Intercept yet?

No. So in it, they talk about how that's becoming like a thing, and it suggests that it's a way of laying the groundwork for assassinations. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's like your passports revoked. You're technically not a citizen anymore, so you're open for assassination overseas

by a drone strike or something. So yeah. So a lot of people are like, let's just leave the passports alone, let's leave the passports out of this. You guys are really taking this right and revoking it based on 100 people in the whole world. They're in the whole country. So it's a big thing.

Interesting. If you lose your passport, while you're abroad, it's no fun. And that's why they always recommend that you make copies of your passport and leave with a family member at home. That'll help you get it back quicker after you fill out DS Stroke 64.

Yeah, and don't forget to make copies and keep them with you as well, like hidden in your luggage too. That's a good idea. And I think, well, you can get hooked up at the embassy, right, in whatever country you're in. Yeah. That's the first place I'd go if I was in trouble. Oh, sure.

Because that's what they do in the movies. Yeah. That's what Matt Damon always does. Did you see the thing about camouflage passports? No. This woman named Donna. Shalala? No.

What was her name? Donna Walker. Back in the 80s, she came up with this idea of camouflage passports. It's like a fake passport that somebody can have that is for a made-up country that sounds uninteresting. So if a terrorist is looking for Americans to kill,

and you show them your East Timor or, well, that's a real country. Yeah. But like a made-up passport that looks real, they might just pass you by for somebody else. And it's a real thing. They've been made and issued. And people have made it out of Kuwait, I think.

Europeans made it out of Kuwait using camouflage passports. But it's also really wide open for fraud and that kind of stuff. That sounds Argo-esque. Very Argo-esque. I'm from Sea Land. Don't shoot. Well, that's a real place, too. Sea Land.

Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. Is that Sea Land theme? No. I can't. Oh, I think that was He-Man? Yeah, maybe. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Is that where we are now? Josh just. You look like you're about to read. Well, Josh just said, go ahead. So that means it's time for real. Oh, wait, is this a listening mail? I thought this was more passport stuff you're about to read. So you don't have anything else to take it.

I don't. I mean, there's some other nitty-gritty stuff. But what I would recommend is you read the House of Works article, because that's where it all lives. That's right. And there are some more details in there that we didn't reveal. You will find that by typing that word in the search

bar at HouseofWorks.com, and I said, search bar. Now it's time for the go-ahead. All right. All right, this is a very special listener mail, by the way, from David. Hey, guys, just listen to the vestigial organs episode. And for the first time ever, you hit a flat note with me. Chuck was talking about receiving some criticism

for joking around about calling men dumb. Josh seemed to dismiss the idea of anybody needing to raise the mantle of men. It is clear to me that you were just being funny by deprecating maleness to shine a light on how great women are. I've always admired how thoughtful and gentlemanly you guys are in regards to women.

That's why I felt a twinge of pain at your apathy for the struggle of some men with their gender. And we've got to say, David, we didn't, like, you really opened your eyes here. Big time, man. I'm a male. I am also gay and short and introverted and emotional and sensitive.

It sounds like me, except I'm straight. As a child, being male meant that I couldn't play with the toys I wanted to. I had to roughhouse and play football with boys twice my size. As a teenager, I sat on the sidelines while all my female friends were going on dates and getting their first kisses from the boys I secretly liked.

I eventually grew out of those problems. But even today, I work in female-dominated fields as an administrative assistant. My bosses are generally men, and I have missed out on a lot of opportunity because they often prefer my prettier female colleagues. I've often wondered if there's a part of their brain that is concerned with how they would be perceived working

with a male assistant. Which is a good point, I think. I've always wanted to be a father, and when I looked into a few years back, I looked into it. I was dismayed with the suspicion and ignorance many people hold for single men who want to adopt, which is crazy. That's me talking.

And of course, up until recently, being male prevented me from marrying the man I love. Being male has been an obstacle I've had overcome to get everything I have ever really wanted out of life. Perhaps being male has made a lot of men's lives easier, but for me, it's been opposite. There is an increasingly wide gender disparity

and academic achievement. Some devoted fathers suffer from biased family law. It values female parents above male parents and male victims of rape and domestic abuse face a lack of resources and an unsympathetic public. That's true. Man, this guy is hitting all the points. Male privilege doesn't work for all men.

I know you didn't mean anything by the dumb guy's comment and was perhaps for two straight guys with seemingly very happy lives. It is immediately apparent that other guys view the advantages and disadvantages of being male differently. I hate to shine a light on this one small thing, because you guys are awesome and do a great job, just as you have alerted me to the complexities of hundreds

of topics in your podcast. I hope you will examine the complexities of maleness and see that we cannot all be painted with one wide privileged brush. This is probably one of the best listener males we've ever gotten. Great. Intelligent, insightful.

I mean, change just my perspective on things. Absolutely. I realized that by us saying, us taking the liberty of on behalf of all men, putting down men, in order to boost up women, that that in and of itself is the definition of male privilege, because we were just assuming that everybody has it as great as we do.

Sure. And this guy pointed out that we were wrong. And thank you, David, seriously. That is one of the best listener males we've ever had. Agreed. Yeah, thank you. Great way to end a bad podcast. If you want to see what you got and you

can try to compete with David's all-time great listener male, you can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

On the podcast, hey dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, The Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts.