Ohio birth certificate

I HIDE MY BIRTH CERTIFICATE AT THE back of a file drawer in my closet at home. A black-and-white photostat with a raised official seal, it was issued by the New York City Department of Health in May 1968, around the time I received my greetings from the Selective Service. If I needed a fresh copy today, it would be a job to get. The city's Health Department would want my father's name, my mother's maiden name, the name of the hospital I was born in, and my reason for wanting the copy. I'd have to show a photo ID. If any others wanted my certificate, they would not only have to show their IDs but one of mine as well, plus a letter from me authorizing the certificates release, signed and notarized.

For once, bureaucratic obstructionism pleases me. We all learned in September what can happen when the wrong people get the right credentials. Yet we live in a country that has no citizenship registry and awards citizenship to anyone whose mother happened to be here on the day she gave birth. The American birth certificate proves American citizenship; it is the only proof most of us have. As such, it is a credential with the power to "breed" an American identity--up to and including an American passport.

Lucky for our national security, then, that the records clerks of New York would never issue a genuine, forgery-proof, certified copy of my birth certificate to just anybody. No, just anybody has to go to California for some of those.

I flew out to Los Angeles not long ago, and drove north to the government center of Ventura County, a concrete campus set in a big parking lot. In the recorder's office, members of the public were studying computer screens and microfiche readers. Behind the counter, a clerk rose to help me, an American flag glittering on her lapel. I said I wanted to buy a few birth certificates--no particular ones, for no particular reason. "It doesn't matter who you are," she said. "We don't ask people why they come in. If you have the name, we'll look it up."

I didn't have a name handy, so she brought out the microfiche index. Five plastic sleeves contained every birth recorded in Ventura County going back to 1873. I cruised the lists and lighted on three names: Dennis Alan Duck, Frank David Born and Joshua Ezra Ladin. I completed three order slips--leaving out birth dates, fathers' names and mothers' maiden names--and handed them to the clerk. In ten minutes, she appeared with the certificates. They had embossed seals, the heft and texture of bank notes and the complexity of Serabend carpets: steel-engraved intaglio borders with "Vital Record" printed in microline around their inner edges; pink-and-blue fields watermarked "Official Vital Record" and flecked with security thread. The order slips didn't ask for my phone number or address. I signed them with a false name. The certificates cost $12 each. I paid cash, zipped them into my shoulder bag and walked out.

In public-records parlance, California is an "open" state. It not only lets anybody buy a certified copy of anybody's birth certificate, but its law bars clerks from selling anything but certified copies. Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Ohio, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin also keep records open. Together, they have 2,375 offices that sell birth certificates for the asking. In Tennessee, Kentucky, and New Jersey, local offices won't sell to just anyone, but central offices will. In Iowa and North Carolina, central offices won't but local offices will.

Plenty of lowlifes know about this already. Now, well-tutored terrorists probably know, too--and some federal law-enforcers are getting nervous. Since September, the government has been setting traps for terrorists who hold visas. Visas are harder than ever to get and offer no protection against detention and deportation. Higher-ups in Washington may not have noticed, but terrorists intent on slipping through the dragnet don't want visas anymore.

"With what happened on September 11, a lot of these folks in the terrorist world now are traveling around with false passports, birth certificates, drivers' licenses," George Hungate told me. He is head of watch operations for the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the inter-agency El Paso Intelligence Center. "In years past, it was illegal aliens looking for jobs. Then it went to criminals, then to fugitives, and here we are now with narcotics and terror."

An Algerian named Ahmed Ressam set a chilling precedent in December 1999 by posing as a Canadian. Driving into the United States on his way to bomb the Los Angeles Airport, he presented a Montreal birth certificate to prove Canadian citizenship. Ressam didn't make it to Los Angeles, but he did show that using a birth certificate to pose as someone else was a cinch up north. If would-be terrorists can pose as Canadians that way, why not simply pose as Americans?

Hit-and-Stay Crimes

Bradley Washburn is one American who knows how easily that can happen. An engineering technician, Washburn lives in Greensboro, N.C. In 1995, he got a call from an agent of the Diplomatic Security Service, an arm of the State Department that investigates passport fraud. On Dec. 14, 1995, a U.S. Passport Agency officer in Miami came across an application filed at a Tampa post office by a Bradley Edward Washburn who had produced a birth certificate showing he was born on August 3, 1954 in Greensboro, N.C. But the man made a small omission: He hadn't supplied a Social Security number.

Suspicious, the officer handed the application to a security service agent who looked up Washburn in the Greensboro telephone book. There he was. On the phone, Washburn said he had never applied for a passport. The agent soon found that the applicant's Tampa apartment was rented to a Robert Finks, born Nov. 23, 1953. He knocked on the door and arrested him. His fingerprints matched those in FBI records of one Robin Ray Fink, born June 13, 1955 and wanted in Maryland for bank fraud.

"It's a weak document," the real Bradley Washburn said when I called to ask about his abused birth certificate. "Anybody who knows what I know realizes how easily it can be obtained."

Identity theft, an American growth crime, wasn't the crime committed against Washburn. Identity thieves steal information to get credit cards, use them, and disappear fast. What befell Washburn--far less common, but in the context of terror no less troubling--is called "impostor fraud." The crime isn't hit-and-run; it's hit-and-stay. The impostor's aim is to become another person, allowing traces of a life best concealed to dry up and blow away. No impostor would leave electronic footprints with a credit card. His essential tool, of minor value to identity thieves, is the birth certificate--a document able to spawn credentials that, in circular fashion, can corroborate the holder's identity.

"The birth certificate--that's the one that starts everything," a Diplomatic Security Service agent told me. "If you have that, that's it. That's all you need. You are that person."

Start with a birth certificate and a utility bill addressed to the name on it; agencies often ask for bills as proof of local residence. With those, you can enroll in school for a student ID, or take a job and get a photo ID from an employer. Getting a CostCo card and a library card wouldn't hurt. You can then use all your ID cards to verify that the birth certificate is yours. Along the way, you may be asked for a Social Security number. The government will issue a new or duplicate number to the name on the certificate. Failing that, you can make a number up. Social Security numbers aren't identity codes. Even the police find them hard to trace.

"We'd have to go to a public source," a U.S. law enforcement official said. "For us to get it out of the Social Security Administration is almost impossible without a subpoena--and that's for a law-enforcement organization. If you're in the driver's license business, it's next to impossible."

Which is a reason why drivers' licenses remain easy pickings for impostors--as they were for September's terrorists. But impostors in possession of a certified birth certificate can go farther, and even parlay a driver's license and a Social Security number into that most desirable of documents, the U.S. passport. The State Department issues seven million passports a year, yet its 4,500 clerks receive little schooling against fakery. Fraud taints up to 1 percent of applications, the department estimates: 70,000 a year. Agents investigate between 4,000 and 5,000, and only the frauds they uncover that lead to more serious crimes are ever prosecuted.