The passport moment

Wicked quips on Twitter gave the whole shebang a rollicking, comedic twist.

I mean, one cannot help but snicker when one reads the following lines: “Because (the) previous contractor got pissed when it got terminated it ran off with the data,” or “I will autopsy the yellow crowd who did the passport deal alive” and finally, “data is not run-away-able but made inaccessible.”

Amusement aside, Foreign Secretary Teodoro “Teddy Boy” Locsin Jr.’s Twitter outburst can in fact be episode titles about the lost passport data story — how it unfolded from its initial bombshell towards its whimpering end.

To get what I mean, isn’t Locsin’s tweet about a previous passport printing contractor “running away” with passport data a wonderful start at gaining the aroused curiosity of just about anybody on a mystery story?

By now, we are familiar with the ensuing firestorm of the Locsin revelation which essentially is all about people’s privacy and the integrity of protecting personal data which government collects about people.

No one who counted was left out when the storm hit: senators and congressmen immediately voiced alarms as did the Privacy Commission, Malacañang, the Defense and Police establishment, the Church, the Vice President, Mr. Duterte’s rabid supporters and rabid detractors — just about anybody who happened to have a social media account or access to media.

Sideshows too regaled the aroused crowd with former foreign affairs boss Perfecto Yasay getting some primetime when he added more political twists following Locsin’s initial charge that previous administrations were to blame for the mess.

He resurrected an old controversy about an alleged fishy deal involving the transfer of the printing of passports from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and a French printing firm to a government printer, the APO Production Unit (APO).

Yasay alleged APO had entered into an illegal contract with a private firm, even as he admitted he did not stop the deal on advice of certain powerful politicians. APO has since denied it had entered into an illegal agreement with a private firm.

Not to be outdone, Locsin added more fuel to the fire when he said he needed “to do an autopsy on the yellow crowd.” As expected, supporters of Mr. Noynoy Aquino were up in arms over the quip.

This week, however, the furor started showing signs of dying down. Locsin said no data was leaked and APO said the French firm earlier suspected of running away with the data had in fact turned over the data, only that APO could not “accessed” the data.

By midweek, Locsin said the DFA (Department of Foreign Affairs) was not requiring birth certificates for passport renewals, signaling Locsin had come full circle to his initial concrete problem: how to unburden those renewing passports with a document that was not actually required anymore.

This latest development will likely dampen the controversy over the passport data mess. It is also not clear whether there will still be congressional investigations.

Now, if you should feel I’ve treated the whole issue lightly, don’t fret as I too believe any leak of personal data to unscrupulous individuals is deplorable. It is just that in my belief we shouldn’t be too overly hot on the collar about it. In truth, the integrity of our personal data has long been compromised by government, with the data on some of us compromised since birth.

Take the matter of birth certificates, which was the initial cause of Locsin’s Twitter storm. The long lines and the sordid condition of the offices of the budget-strapped Philippine Statistical Authority, which issues the document, simply do not compare to the shock on discovering that your birth certificate shows you are not exactly who you are.

Unbelievable? Numerous cases are known where the name on one’s birth certificate does not correspond to the name one has been known since birth. Take the extreme case of a friend of mine. Her name, including her surname, which she had been using since birth was altogether different from the name on her birth certificate!

Other common birth certificate problems are the lack of “Jrs.” in names, first names and surnames spelled wrong, wrong birthdays and even one’s sex. If all these aren’t compromises, I don’t know what compromise is.

Of course, all these mistakes, probably committed long ago by lazy or clueless civil registrar staff, need legal remedies. And when there’s legalities most of us immediately duck for cover, not only because of the cost of hiring lawyers but also because most of us are appallingly ignorant on how we are to go about solving the problem.

Adjusting to this unavoidable reality, the DFA resorted to just copying what is on the birth certificate submitted to them on the first application for a passport. If they didn’t do that, imagine how long it would be to get a passport if one exhausted all legal means!

Other than birth certificates, there are also several other official documents, needed for work both here and abroad, which are also riddled with mistakes. It would be too long to detail these other horrors here, however.

Suffice it to say that these horrors drive my argument that before we even talk about the loss of our personal data, we all have to square up to the fact that the accuracy of our personal data that’s now with government is an even more serious problem.