There Oughtta Be a Law. . .Oh Wait, There Is!

My sainted mother saddled me with a name that many people find lovely, but after years of having it mispronounced, misspelled, and misunderstood, I changed it. For most of my adult life, I have been known as Ann. Very few people know that this is my middle name, and fewer know what goes before it.

Ann is a good, solid, American name, simple to spell, and truly difficult to mispronounce. I like it. It is mine. It’s on my credit cards, my bills, my driver’s license, my checks.

One day, I decided to leave the country and applied for a passport. Enter that beacon of obtuseness, the U.S. Department of State. In order to get a little book that identifies me by photograph and proves my U.S. citizenship, I fill out a multiple-page application and submit certified copies of every legal document I have ever had issued in my name. Among these papers was an innocuous-looking yellow document issued by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania: my birth certificate.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania issues a certified birth certificate which is best described as taciturn. Along with the issuing authority, the information on the document includes first, middle, and surnames, city and county of birth, birth date and sex. That is all. No mother’s name, father’s name, time, astrological sign, or race. Nothing else, not even the fact that I was born alive. 

Now a State Department employee might have looked at the certificate and thought “this must be a mistake,” and asked for another copy, since the only name on the certificate that matched any other on any of the paperwork was “Ann.” Else they might have figured that I had discarded the use of my first name, and issued my passport to match all the other documents I submitted. But no. I got Mother Superior herself at the State Department, whose duty it was to ensure that the name my mother gave me, that other first name, should hound me to the grave, and issued the passport in my given name.

It’s hard to describe the look on someone’s face when they address you by the name they are certain is yours, only to have you ignore them because you don’t realize they are talking to you. It’s something along the lines of, “Is anyone really so stupid that they don’t recognize their own name?” In point of fact, some people are, and I am one of them.

Customs and border patrol agents are particularly put off because obviously, someone who doesn’t know their name must be traveling with a falsified passport, ergo, must be a terrorist, therefore they should empty all their belongings and submit to a “random” (my ass) search.

When I didn’t leave the country for several years running, the problem faded from my consciousness. It faded, that is, until I lost my driver’s license. I could have used my social security card to prove my identity to the Texas Department of Public Safety, but because this is illegal (at least according to the card itself), I chose not to. Alas, thus began my journey to the dark side.

I grabbed my passport without thinking and went off to replace my license, not realizing that the clerk would question the fact that my names didn’t match exactly. She did. Then she changed my name, but not before some big, angry state trooper woman with a gun (and my passport in her hand) told me that I could agree, leave, or go away in handcuffs for disorderly conduct. Now, driving while not in possession of one’s license is illegal in Texas, which means that if I chose option B, I would be ticketed the minute I left the parking lot. So I agreed, which was the only choice.

Being madder than a wet hen, I decided that I would legally jettison this moniker my mother hung on me once and for all, before any more of these kinds of ripples cascaded through my life.

Off to the Internet I go, ready to change my name. The first thing I discover is that to legally change my name, which involves filing 2 pieces of paper and spending 5 minutes with a judge, costs $230 in addition to notary fees, certified copy fees, and a lawyer, if you employ one. The day comes when I have enough money to change my name, and I print out the forms. This is when I discover that along with proving who I’ve been for all of my life through certified copies of everything, I also have to be fingerprinted.

I have the option to go to the Department of Public Safety, but since I think of them as the Gestapo now, I decide to have the county sheriff do the work. Bad idea. On arriving at the courthouse, after passing through the metal detector and having my purse x-rayed, I ask for the sheriff’s office. Just go to the county jail, the deputy says. I should have known that I was in for a treat.

Jails are not pleasant places, nor should they be. Our county, however, went above and beyond the call of duty and employed Satan as their interior decorator.

A sheriff’s deputy let me know he was coming to get me through a bullet-proof window in the waiting area, which was dingy and badly lit. A few minutes later, I heard a loud metallic clanking sound, which turned out to be the jail doors unlocking. He opened the heavy, yellow, steel door that had no handle on the outside and motioned me in.

I couldn’t help but shudder when he closed that door. It would have taken a stick of dynamite to open it without the key. He led me deeper into the jail than I had ever hoped to go, past similar yellow doors with shutters over the windows, and bad smells emanating from behind them. We arrived in the booking area, where two female "subjects" were sitting in chairs answering occasional questions from one of several deputies behind the desk. There, Officer Bowser, for such his name was, proceeded to take my fingerprints.

Note carefully, I did not say he made them, he printed them, or any other verb you might think applied. He took them by placing my fingers on a scanner which photographed them. My fingerprints are now property of the United States Government. Wait a minute. Don’t you have to do something wrong to end up in this position? Isn't this how we treat criminals? Nope. In 2003, Congress passed a law that mandated that persons changing their names legally had to supply their fingerprints (biometric identification) to the government to keep on file.

Maybe it sounds like Chicken Little, but I don’t like it. Don’t we take the fingerprints of criminals to ensure that if they do bad things in the future, they get caught? Now we are taking the fingerprints of everyone, criminal or not. The State of Texas has required drivers to supply their social security cards and give both thumbprints for years. What is to stop someone from falsifying “evidence” using the information on file? At first blush, it sounds cloak-and-dagger, but is it really?  

That old bastion of anti-patriotism, the American Civil Liberties Union reports that people don’t care for the idea, but that Big Brother is finding ways to launder policies by instigating them outside normal governmental channels. In this way, biometric databases can be touted as a good thing in foreign countries, and when we set up ours, we can say, “Look! The Czech Republic has had biometric IDs for years, and nobody is fussing.”

Yeah, I wanna be just like the Czech Republic, don’t you?