Want a passport? State Department wants your life story.

Making it hard to for others to enter the US is a just a nuisance. Making it hard for US citizens to leave the US is one of the most terrifying things I can think of.

While I believe Obama was born in the US, it's interesting that you can become President of the US without having to show a birth certificate, but you can't leave the country without producing one. Doubly interesting because the Constitution specifically requires the President to be US-born, but says nothing about passports.

Glad I got mine recently. I was freaked out by the fact that when I handed them my birth certificate, they didn't hand it back. "It will be returned to you by mail" they said; I'm not sure why they needed to keep the birth certificate, but it did in fact come back to me. (I was more freaked out over the fact that I had paid 50 dollars for the birth certificate and didn't want to lose it (plus dropping another 220 to get the passport rushed))

I'm a US citizen, with a US birth certificate, but to apply for a social security number I had to provide proof of address for every year of my life. The process took a year.

It's in the nature of bureaucracies to accumulate information, the larger and more inefficient, the more paperwork they demand to fulfill their 'process'.

> when the applicant submits citizenship or identity evidence that is insufficient or of questionable authenticity

So the vast majority can stick with driver's license and birth certificate. I think this is overblown.

It looks to be a typically outrageous limitation introduced without much thought or reason.

I can't understand why people would actually want a US passport.