There are three ways to look at the mindset of a reporter. It’s either the life of a professional pessimist, a cynic for hire or… and this is the way I chose to look at it, the continuing adventures of a Boy Scout. Don’t get me wrong, while I was in fact a Boy Scout – kerchief, socks, merit badges and all – I’m of course referring to the motto of being prepared.
You can be working on the most harmless story about how to avoid buying a Christmas tree worthy of a Charlie Brown holiday special, and that will be the day the Colorado branch of the DEA has the raw nerve to raid a secret marijuana farm east of Pueblo (granted, not a major priority today, but in 1998…), so you have to be prepared to turn around, put whatever was cooking on the front burner on simmer and start from scratch… usually at around thirty minutes before airtime, if experience holds. You may have prepared a spiffy little feel good piece about holiday returns for the usually vanilla Christmas broadcast (and if you’re noticing a trend here, you’re not mistaken. Why does hell always break lose on national holidays?) and before you can say “fruitcake surprise” the police are called to the house of a kidnapping, and first it turned out that the ex-husband grabbed the kids without telling the ex-wife and six hours later in a fit of remorse and regret comes back with the kids, but there’s already been an Amber alert and for some reason he decides to show up with not one but two guns and the only police on the scene when he arrives are two public information officers who last fired a weapon sometime on the practice range sometime around the date the first George Bush was feeling a little queasey around the Japanese Prime Minister. It was the scariest crime scene I have ever been on, waiting to see which inexperienced marksman would accidentally fire heir weapon first. My photographer was the only smart one on the scene, shooting video from behind a dumpster half a block away.
As an aside, we beginners in the business like to pretend we’re all tough and experienced and whatnot, but I wasn’t the person who coined the phrase “a don’t tell Mom moment.” It started in local news with fresh out of college news folk who find themselves in various stages of danger that they just don’t tell you about in News 101. they mention the war zones, the earthquakes and Compton. They don’t tell you about the public information officer wit the itchy trigger finger.
Where I’m going with this… at long last… is you have to be prepared for life to go a little sideways and this applies to your travel plans. You have to be prepared. I want to write a little bit about three simple steps you can take that all pay big dividends when it comes to keeping you on the road, even when things go wrong.
This, by the way, is not a post about safety. There are many pieces to be written about that, but those are on the way, but rather a post about precautions you can take that will help you keep your identity safe.
This is the point where I should also emphasize that something will go wrong during your travels. This is the reporter in me… not the cynic or the pessimist, but the practical voice of experience. Whether that’s a big something or a small something is an unknown quantity, but travel plans going awry is one of the rules o the road.
Backup your backups
Remember me saying that I was going to be a real bear when it comes to the idea of printing hard copies of everything important? Here it is again, and this time, I’m referring to your passport. Yes, your passport is a hard copy, but before you leave, you should get a certified copy of your passport to take with you, and which you should store in a different place than your original.
There are two ways to do this. The first, and official way to do this, according to the United States Department of State, is to apply for a certified copy of your passport. This can take some time, even for an expedited copy, but if you do have at least two to three weeks before you leave (preferably three weeks or more), it’s a good idea to have this certified copy on hand. The second, and little used option, is a lot faster, a little less expensive, but can also get you out of a bind. All you need to do is go to your local UPS store or similar copy service (I used UPS) and get a notarized copy of your passport. The point is that you want something on your person or property that proves you are a valid U.S. passport holder if your original passport is lost or stolen and you need to go to the embassy to get new temporary travel documents.
If you are traveling for work, I should note that some countries will also accept notarized copies of your passport in your application for a work visa. For our current documentary, my cinematographer and I were applying for work visas to film in New Zealand and the application instructed us to include our original passports with our applications, which they promised would be returned to us in time for our departure. I was… skeptical. and have to admit this was simply not a risk I was willing to take with less than five weeks to go before our departure. New Zealand, while a lovely country, and one to which I plan on visiting again… if only to see what was up with an attraction on the way to Wellington called “Owlcatraz,” and to further explore exactly why, and I am not kidding about this, there is thriving competition in the manufacture and sale of pony manure (we saw pieces as low $1.00 NZ pr bag, which seems reasonable, but I’m told interested parties can bargain the price down to fifty cents). However, New Zealand also seems to be a county where the bureaucracy, while intending to make life easy, seems to stutter step along the way. How else to explain instructions on the official government website that link to a govt.nz address when the actual page is a gov.nz address (and sometimes vice-versa). Or a work visa application that take pains to instruct filmmakers to fill out an application that has been out of service for more than three years? The bottom line is sending original passports seemed like a mighty big ask,so we sent notarized copies of our passports, which served us well, got us our work visas and sent us on our merry way. The extra copies we had made were stowed in our run bags in case of emergency. You should take those precautions too. Your passport is by far the most valuable document you will have during your travels, Don’t make it travel solo.
Keep the identity thieves at bay
While we’re on the subject of passports, lets talk about identity thieves and go beyond the standard advice of keeping your passport in something like an under the shirt money belt or document pouch. Those are table stakes. I’m talking about taking an extra step that can save your identity from snooping electronic eyes.
Your passport, like your driver’s license and many of your credit cards, is now outfitted with what is called an RFID chip, an electronic chip that carries all of you personal information on it. Whether you know it or not, you are also broadcasting this information to anyone who knows how to pick it up. An airport is a gold mine for identity thieves. All they have to do is brush up against you with an RFID reader that can be bought on the open market and they can pick up everything they need to steal your identity – your passport number, your social security number, your place and date of both, your home address, your credit car numbers, your driver’s license number… are you scared yet? You should be.
Spend a few dollars. by a wallet or purse sleeve that blocks the signal in your passport and other pieces of identification and put them in that pouch. Protect yourself and your identity with this very simple piece of anti-technology.
Make the call
The last tip is a credit card and debit card precaution, and it’s also a bit of a segueway into a future post about cash management. I’m always surprised by how many travelers don’t take the step of letting their banks know about their travel plans. Yes, you can fix this problem retroactively if something goes wrong, but why not handle it ahead of time? For every county in which you plan to travel, let your credit and debit card issuers know about your plans. This accomplishes two goals. First, you will drastically cut down on the hassle of your cards being rejected at point of sale or worse, begin eaten by an international ATM that thinks your card isn’t where it’s supposed to be (this happens a lot in Europe, where modern ATM cards have those RFID chips that many United Sates debit cards still do not have). Second, it is the first line of defense if your cards are stolen or the numbers are otherwise obtained and sold through black market internet sites. Purchasing stolen card numbers is a huge underground business today. You may also want to consider seeing if your card allows you to use a virtual number for purchases, so that the real number of your account never changes hands.
These are three steps that can help cut off identity theft problems before they happen, and they are steps I’m glad we took on our recent travels in the South Pacific. It was ease of mind that cost us less than $50 , but would have been priceless in the event of a travel nightmare.
Next week: your cash and how to maximize it while on the road.
