The perma-frost is melting up in Alaska . That is the condition in which the soil all the way to the surface never thaws. The ice layer is getting deeper and deeper in the ground, and sooner or later it will go away.

The warming conditions are real there, measurable, and I am hoping the argument about climate change is over. The roads in that sprawling state are mostly unpaved, since there is no need with the soil frozen solid.

Or rather, they used to be frozen. Now there are settlements connected only by great ribbons of mud.

I can only imagine the impact something like that would have in the lower forty-eight. I prefer to think of things like that, rather than the Cardinals victory in Game Three of the World Series. I saw where things were going and toddled off to bed as the seventh inning loomed, real as climate change.

I am doing what I can to prepare, both for the possibility that the Tigers will fail, and the loss of the perma-frost. There may come a time when it becomes important to re-locate. I renewed my passport .

The old one was still good, all the way through April of next year. I still have a valid Black Passport, a diplomatic one that is supposed to confer all manner of wonderful immunities, but I have never found that it worked out that way. Besides, it says clearly in the fine print that private citizens are expressly prohibited from traveling on them. The Global War has conferred a new security standard on international travel, even the American suburbs of Canada . Passports are now going to be required to travel to a lot of places where they were unnecessary, like Windsor , Ontario .

I normally am not that good about thinking about things that are inevitable but distant; I am by nature a procrastinator, a trait I apparently share with policy-makers all over the world who are doing little to deal with climatic change, unless they are secretly purchasing prospective beach-front property in Nevada .

I don’t have any international travel on the horizon, at least nothing scheduled. But not having the critical document could mean passing up an opportunity, if one came along, and as I said, national conditions could change quickly.

There is something else. I was reading last month that the new Radio Frequency identification Chips are going to be part of the new passport format. We are all going to be carrying document that broadcast information like cases of soda in the WalMart.
It is part of the enhanced security profile, and will give the government a more comprehensive means of keeping track of us. Additional information will be available at border crossing points, and the officials say it will make us all safer.

That could be true. I carried a military ID card that had a chip in it the last few years before I retired. Ultimately, it was supposed to carry the equivalent of my paper service and medical record, so I could present it at any DoD facility and be instantly plugged into the personnel support system, or a hospital.

It would also serve as the key to computer and building access, permitting me to go some places and not others.

The sinister thing about it was that if it was lost, or stolen, so went my entire professional life.

A similar chip is what they want to put in the passport, although they have not announced comprehensive plans for what information might be stored on it. An RFID chip does not contain a lot of data, but it might be sufficient to ensure that I don’t accidentally wander into Cuba , for example, or some place the Government might deem unsuitable.

The other problem with the chips is that they can be �read� just like the soda cases by those who have nothing to do with immigration control. Early models of the chip were read in the pockets of the bearers, dozens of feet away. I remembered the early days of cell phones, when people would camp out on highway overpasses, copying the information of the people whizzing along below, and then using the access information to run up huge bills.

There is a lot you can do with someone’s identity these days, none of it pleasant. The authorities say they have designed special shielding for the passport cover that will mask the chip except when it is presented to the proper authorities.

That is fine. But I do not want to carry the first model. The article I read boasted that the first of the new passports are being issued now from a facility in Colorado . That is what made me hustle down to the Post Office and apply for one issued somewhere else. It came in the mail yesterday, proudly old-fashioned, and containing no RFID chip.

It is good until late in 2016, a year that still seems like science fiction to me. For a document that is valid for so long, it seems better to let someone else conduct the experiment about its security. Maybe you.

In 2016, after all, all of Alaska ‘s perma-frost will have melted, and we may be traveling north, passports in hand, to wear our bikinis in Newfoundland .

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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