Born yesterday: terrorists don't need visas when they can get a real U.S. birth certificate.

• Author: Newman, Barry

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...