Did you catch this story doing the rounds and picked up by The Telegraph today? A Canadian chap used his iPad as a passport to get into and out of the country:

Martin Reisch said on Tuesday a slightly annoyed US border officer let him cross into the United States from Quebec after he presented a scanned copy of his passport on his Apple iPad.

Mr Reisch was a half hour from the border when he decided to try to gain entry rather than turn back and make a two-hour trek back home to Montreal to fetch his passport.

He told the officer he was heading to the US to drop off Christmas gifts for his friend’s kids. He said that true story, the scanned passport and his driver’s licence helped him get through last week.

via Man enters US without passport – thanks to his iPad – Telegraph.

You can bet that somewhere there’s a National Security Director having kittens at this news.

However I’m pleased for the chap — I’m pleased his technology was able to help him out. Since he had his driver’s license to confirm his ID and since (I’m sure) the immigration officer was able to a quick lookup on the passport number to verify, all was good.

I doubt the Americans — or any Government — will want to encourage this sort of behaviour. Surely* this kind of issue is bound to occur all over the world every day?

How long must we do the silly dance with the immigration officers when we’re moving from country to country.

I find it rather silly that I have to stand in line nowadays when I visit the States given the amount of verification that takes place. I recently had to renew my ESTA application for a trip. It went through in miliseconds but they wanted every single piece of information possible to verify my ID. That *MUST* be presented on screen (or on some big ‘orrible massive computer) when I turn up at the immigration desk and present my passport.

When will we get a Passport app for the iPad? Bring it on.

[*And don't call me Shirley -- for any fans of the movie, Airplane]

Finally — just in case you find yourself at SFO minus your passport but with other forms of semi useful ID, make sure you’ve got a high-res scan of your passport in either Evernote or DropBox…

And yeah, I look shocking in that passport photo. So bad that when I was leaving Germany a while ago, the immigration officer helpfully told me he thought I looked like an Axe Murderer. And folk say the Germans don’t have a sense of humour!

Vodafone’s answer to ridiculous roaming charges whilst abroad is Vodafone Passport. At least in the UK.

It’s generally automatically enabled on most new accounts and you don’t have to pay anything extra to qualify. Indeed if you’d like to check if it’s activated, you can call 5555 in the UK, plus it’s not restricted to contract customers, if you’re Pay As You Talk, you can get it too.

The concept is this. When abroad in a qualifying country, you can make calls back to the UK at your normal UK rates — and use your bundled minutes. The only addition is the application of a 75p connection charge for every call you make.

You’re also charged for every incoming call in this manner. 75p a go.

If you talk for longer than 60 minutes, you’ll be billed 20p per minute — so remember to hang-up.

On the face of it, this is actually a pretty wicked deal. You can be sat at the beach front in Cannes, South of France, and call your friend for 59 minutes — and pay only 75p extra if you’re using your bundled minutes.

The alternative without the Vodafone Passport is something like £1.50 per minute. That would make the same 59 minute call cost just over eighty-eight quid between friends.

So if you’re an EU commissioner looking into the rather crazy roaming charges, Vodafone Passport doesn’t look that bad. The 75p charges certainly mount up if you’re a regular user of your mobile. If, for example, you make and receive 30 calls a day and you’re abroad for 5 days, you’d STILL come back to a £112.50 bill composed of 75p connection charges. But it’s better than being hosed for £1.50 per minute.

Here’s my problem.

Firstly, it doesn’t operate in +1. Numero Uno. The United States. Despite the mighty Vodafone owning a whopping chunk of Verizon, one of the biggest networks around (CDMA, granted), there’s no sign of Vodafone Passport being extended to that country. Indeed it only works in France, for example, if you’re careful enough to roam on SFR. Most Voda handsets will do this automatically.

The second problem is one I experience all the sodding time when I’m abroad — particularly when I was in Val d’Isere over the Festive period: Getting cut off. It wasn’t my problem. A lot of the time it was shitty network quality at the *other end* — either back in the UK or it was Orange FR screwing up whilst in the resort. So whilst I roamed on a pretty decent SFR connection most of the time, I was being charged 75p a time when my calls disconnected.

I can’t tell you how annoying that is. You call a friend in the resort. You see the call has been answered — you’re thus being ‘charged’ — the 75p has been applied… And… static and a hang-up from the other end. Great.

Call again. Call is answered, but no sound. 75p dropped again.

Wait 2 minutes and call again. Call is answered and you can hear the other person. Another 75p. ARSE. Arse. ARSE. £2.25′s worth of charges in order to get put through.

I most sincerely hope that there’s a clever network engineer somewhere in the bowels of Vodafone working on their billing system making sure that stupid 7 second phone calls that consist of one party yelling “HELLO? HELLO? CAN… YEAH.. CAN YOU HEAR ME?” don’t get billed like the normal ones.

Probably not.

I did some calculations, phoned a few folk and reckoned it wouldn’t be that difficult.

I like the idea of having ewan@ewan.moon as an email address.

I did the typical entrepreneurial fag-packet solution viewpoint.

1. Get a decent server, set it up, configure it.
2. Plug that into some sort of solar energy thing. So it works.
3. Attach a decent 10k/sec transmitter so it can at least talk to us when it’s on the moon.
4. Make it all fit into a package small enough to be shot into space etc.
5. Find someone to fly it there and drop it off.

A good few million quid.

But you’d have a moon email address. And the controversial ability to host applications — albeit at very SLOW data rates — that are outside standard Governmental geographic controls.

So I shelved this when I recognised that I’d be better investing cash elsewhere.

Which brings me to mobile phones and phoning the moon. Natasha Lomas (via silicon, it seems) has posted a story on ZDnet about kitting out the moon with mobile service.

A UK-led mission to put a satellite in orbit around the Moon which could one day enable lunar colonists to use mobile phones to communicate with each other has inched a step closer to blast off.

You can read more about this here. I wonder. Fast forward 20 years and maybe I might not be paying Vodafone 35p a minute to call someone on another UK network anymore.

And, er, since it’s electronic, it’s trackable. So let’s track it!

So goes the thinking behind the latest plans here in the UK to protect the nation.

If you buy a mobile phone on contract, your identity is already confirmed.

If you buy a mobile phone on PAYG — Pay As You Go — you don’t need to prove your identity.

Ergo huge, huge breeding ground for terrorists. Apparently.

With 72% of Vodafone’s almost 19 million UK customers earmarked as potential terrorists , it’s essential that they’re all passported the next time they buy a handset, right?

It’s time for rolling of eyes and acceptance with a wry smile.

The Times of London has the details.

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

A compulsory national register for the owners of all 72m mobile phones in Britain would be part of a much bigger database to combat terrorism and crime. Whitehall officials have raised the idea of a register containing the names and addresses of everyone who buys a phone in recent talks with Vodafone and other telephone companies, insiders say.

The move is targeted at monitoring the owners of Britain’s estimated 40m prepaid mobile phones. They can be purchased with cash by customers who do not wish to give their names, addresses or credit card details.

I hardly think this is going to be very useful for the tracking of would-be terrorists. Tracking guns, drugs and hand grenades might be a little bit more effective.

Still.

Everyone needs a mobile phone, right? Even would-be-terrorists. Who will need to show their fake ID to buy a handset.

Or who will simply steal registered PAYG handsets to make their calls. Like stealing cars.

Or who will buy unlocked handsets from abroad.

Or who will simply use the millions of unregistered PAYG handsets already in the country. There’s plenty of them.

I suppose this could potentially be useful. If you think someone’s going to attack, say, the Houses of Parliament (goodness knows what the folk at GCHQ are thinking of all the keywords in this post already… WARNING WARNING!), and you think the baddie is in the vicinity… simply fire up your black boxes and list every handset operational within 5 miles of the location.

THEN filter out all the ones that are registered to (apparently) real people. With apparent real IDs.

Then you’ll — theoretically — be left with a list of unregistered baddies. Some of which will be 62 year old Mavis, the cleaner, who hasn’t changed her handset for 14 years… and ideally — at least from the point of the anti-terrorist chaps — you should also see some suspicious looking possible-nasty folk that want locking up for 42 days.

This kind of privacy-creep is inevitable.

And I suppose, from a commerce viewpoint, if you have to introduce it into the industry, now’s the time to do it — when the industry is mature.

Think through the ramifications. Every MVNO is going to have a total arse. You’ll no longer be able to walk into huge retailer, Argos, and buy a phone. They simply don’t have the infrastructure to check IDs.

Neither does the likes of Tesco or your average petrol (“Gas”) station where these things are being flogged as impulse purchases. None of these retailers are going to want to faff about with ID recording.

I suppose retailers could insist you purchase with a Switch/Maestro (“Bank Card”) or Credit Card — that way all purchases are theoretically trackable.

But I reckon what the intelligence agencies really want is to be able to type in a mobile phone number and… woosh… within 2 seconds, have the owner’s identity up on screen together with cross-referenced frequently called numbers (and their IDs) and so on.

I’d just like to specify that I work in the mobile industry, right? So when you’re pulling up 07769 658 104, finding the ID Ewan MacLeod and finding that I have an account on *every* network and oodles of handsets, I’d like that displayed. Better still, could you cross reference that with a series of posts from Mobile Industry Review, proving it?

And that record for the Motorola RAZR back a few years ago? Don’t judge me. It was just a phase I was going through…

(Well spotted Denny)

Ridiculous. Vodafone you really need to sort this out.

Posted by email from MIR Live (posterous)