I renewed my passport today at the US Embassy in London and have done a separate post on how the experience which I’ve dreaded has gotten easier. But I wanted to break out a key item. At the moment, 48-page passports are no longer offered to US citizens, a result of the new electronic passports coming in.
What’s a 48 page passport? It’s simply one with twice the number of pages that a regular passport has. Why would you want it? Because you travel a lot and have foreign visas that take up room.
That’s me in a nutshell. An entire page of my US passport is devoted to a UK visa giving me “indefinite leave to remain.”
Indefinite means there’s no set period for when I have to leave the UK, and I get the privilege by being married to a UK citizen. Many more pages of my passport are covered in stamps from all my entries back into the UK when I leave on trips, plus stamps from the US, Germany and many other locations.
When I last renewed my passport nearly 10 years ago, I went for the thicker 48-page version to ensure I didn’t run out of room. Renewing today, I requested that my new one also be 48 pages. That’s when I learned that at the moment, these passports are no more.
Blame terrorism. Well, blame the move to new electronic passports, sparked in part to combat terrorism. They exist as a simulation here. In reality, no one seems to have them yet.
Now, the US Department Of State was saying as of August 12 that these were already being issued. I get that from this reference on a cached page in Google:
On December 30, 2005, the United States began to issue Electronic Passports. It is anticipated that all new full validity U.S. passports will be issued as electronic passports by the end of 2006.
But interestingly, only a few days later, that reference is gone from the same page on the State Department site. So have they begun to be issued or not? According to a recent Wired article on how e-passports can be cloned, apparently this won’t happen until October. But then again, the State Department just put out a press release on August 14 saying they’re going out now, which various publications such as News.com have covered.
Certainly my experience with the US Embassy in London tells me they aren’t going out yet. I’m not getting a new electronic passport, not that I asked for one. Instead, I learned I wouldn’t be getting one by way of my request for the larger 48 page version of a regular passport. Either the US has run out of these and isn’t printing more or mere mortals can no longer get them.
I was told that the US is using up all the remaining stocks of dumb, non-electronic passports before moving to the new electronic ones. That makes sense — why waste the money? Then again, if the new passports are supposed to make us all so much more secure, isn’t it a bit odd to push back the launch of the electronic ones to save money? Isn’t that money well spent by getting us the latest, super-duper most supposedly secure passports we can have?
It’s definitely annoying that I’ll have to hope over the next ten years that I don’t run out of pages. Of course, things like the iris scanning program I’m using to enter the UK mean I’m no longer getting my passport stamped at all when I use that system. Perhaps those 24 pages will last me. But at the very least, there ought to be an option to add in extra pages at the time you do a renewal, if the larger passports aren’t being offered until the electronic ones come in.
Running short of pages yourself? How to add more pages is covered here at the US State Department site. The good news is that it’s free. The bad news is you’ll be without your passport until the pages are added. Since the people who most likely need more pages are frequent travelers, it makes it super hard for them to send passports in. Also note that the 48 page passports are mentioned briefly on that page and over here. But there’s no dedicated page about them that I can find. Perhaps it was pulled or perhaps there never was one.
