Senseless DFA requirement

Malacañang does make sense when it rejected the move of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) announcing the requirement for Filipinos renewing their non-electronic passports to bring with them their original birth certificates, following a data security breach.

The DFA claimed it needs to rebuild the data, the reason for the Filipino traveler renewing his passport with an attached birth certificate.

Geez, what a country! It is the DFA that is at fault, yet it is the Filipino passport holder that is being penalized with more red tape when it is hardly the passport holder’s fault for the data security breach!

A supposed supplier of Philippine passports ran off with all the data when the contract was abruptly canceled.

The DFA said it needs to “rebuild” its database for passports issued before 2010 after a “previous outsourced passport maker took all the data when contract terminated,” DFA Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. earlier said.

One would think what should be more important for the DFA to require is not for the Filipinos renewing their passports to bring with them their birth certificates and even punish those who want to renew their passports by letting them pay more since getting an NSO (National Statistics Office) birth certificate and pay a fee, when it is the DFA’s fault, whether manned by the previous government or the present one.

DFA Assistant Secretary Elmer Cato earlier said that holders of old passports — those issued until 2009 including the brown, green and maroon machine-readable passports — are required to submit birth certificates for the renewal of their passports.

Cato claimed this was necessary as “we need to capture and store the document in our database as we no longer have the physical copy of the document submitted when they first applied.”

It still doesn’t make any sense for the DFA to require Filipinos who are into renewing their passports to bring their birth certificates, since the fact that they are presumably all holders of valid Philippine passports already serve as data to replace that which was supposedly carted off by the supplier/contractor — that is whatever data are needed by the DFA to rebuild the stolen information.

And just what data are so valuable for passports? Surely not the birth certificates?

All that an application form asks is the applicant’s name, parents’ names some of whom are probably dead anyway, date of birth, month, day and year, place of birth, gender, profession (depends on the year applicant either renews passport or applies for one the first time around), place of work, residence and nothing by way of disclosing one’s bank accounts or a bank’s certificate of one’s bank account deposits — something which some countries seek for visa holders.

In such cases anyway, no such bank account and its amount are disclosed to the DFA.

But hey, such disclosures and bank account certifications are stored in foreign embassies, not in the Philippines.

Even any other government ID, such as a drivers’ license, hardly carries any information that can be considered security information, unless one’s height, weight, age, date of birth, place of birth, 20-20 eyesight test failure and in other types of ID, SSS, TIN and GSIS, discloses more information than a passport.

As presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo stated, the public should not be burdened by being required to submit original copies of their birth certificate since obtaining such requires another application process before the Philippine Statistics Authority.

“The submission of the old or current passport which the applicant seeks to renew should suffice for the purpose,” Panelo said in a statement, adding that “the ongoing practice is not only cumbersome to everyone affected but is a form of red tape which this administration frowns upon and will not tolerate.”

What is difficult to understand is why there does not seem to be any move on the part of the DFA to sue the contractor who ran off with the data.

No doubt, there would be a Senate investigation — the better for senators, especially those who are running for reelection — yet giving some of these senators another opportunity to grandstand, because in the end, nothing will be resolved, whether in the Senate itself, in the Department of Justice, the Ombudsman or the courts.

Going by the Senate probes, which almost always end up as a trial and conviction by publicity for the targeted, more innocents are damned and tried in court for many a political reason, which are highly partisan and unfair to the accused who should not have been accused in the first place.

Other government agencies, such as the National Privacy Commission (NPC), said it would investigate the possible data breach.

“Any form of non-availability of personal data, infringement of the rights of data subjects and harms from processing that include inconveniencing the public, must be adequately explained to the satisfaction of the law,” the NPC said.

Ten to one says nothing will come out of these. That’s the way probes go in this country.