Do you need your social security card for a passport

April 7, 2022 Update: Local Social Security offices are offering more in-person appointments and have resumed in-person service for people without an appointment. It is strongly encouraged to continue to go online, call for help, and schedule appointments in advance.

For more information on “How to Get Help from Social Security, visit the website: https://www.ssa.gov/coronavirus/gethelp/

Link to the Social Security Administration website: www.socialsecurity.gov/onlineservices.

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To Obtain a New Social Security Number and Card you will need to provide at least two documents to prove age, identity, and U.S. citizenship or current immigration status.

The new online service allows individuals to get replacement Social Security cards through the Social Security Administration website at: www.socialsecurity.gov/ssnumber

To Obtain a Replacement Card, if lost or stolen, you must prove your identity and U.S. citizenship.

To prove identity: Social Security must see:

U.S. driver’s license; or
State-issued non-driver identity card; or
U.S. passport.

If you do not have these specific documents or cannot get a replacement for them within ten days, Social Security will ask to see other documents, such as:

Employee ID card;
School ID card;
Health insurance card (not a Medicare card);
U.S. military ID card
Letter from doctor, with your name, address, social security number and doctors name, address, and signature

To Prove Age: Social Security must see:

Birth certificate;
If a birth certificate does not exist Social Security may accept:
Religious record made before the age of 5 showing your date of birth
U.S. hospital record of your date of birth
U.S. passport
If you lived outside the U.S.: other records showing long term residence outside the U.S.

To prove U.S. citizenship: Under recent changes in law, only certain documents can be accepted as proof of U.S. citizenship. These include:

U.S. birth certificate;
U.S. passport

To prove immigration status: If you are not a U.S. citizen, Social security must see your current U.S. immigration documents. Acceptable documents include:

I-94 Arrival/Departure Record or admission stamp in the unexpired foreign passport
I-766 Employment Authorization Document, EAD, work permit
Form I-551 (Lawful Permanent Resident Card, Machine Readable Immigrant Visa) with your unexpired foreign passport

How to Change a Name on Your Social Security Card: To change your name on your Social Security card, you must also complete Form SS-5. You need to provide recently issued documents that show your legally changed name such as a marriage document, divorce decree, court order for a name change, or certificate of Naturalization showing the new name. The new Social Security card will show your new name, but will have the same number as your old card.

All documents must be either originals or copies certified by the issuing agency. Social Security cannot accept photocopies or notarized copies of documents or receipts showing you have applied for a document.

When we reported last week on the passport provisions in the new “Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act”, we focused on the details of the rules for denial or revocation of US passports of citizens alleged to owe more than $50,000 in Federal taxes.

We should, perhaps, have put more emphasis on the other new basis we mentioned for the denial of a passport application: failure to provide a valid Social Security account number on the passport application form. This could affect more people than the linkage of passports to taxes.

While the shorthand title on our blog post referred to people who “don’t have” a Social Security number, the same fate could befall anyone who chooses not to disclose their Social Security number. The new law would authorize but not require the Secretary of State — at her standardless “discretion” — to deny any passport application that doesn’t contain a valid Social Security number.

There are probably more US citizens who don’t have a Social Security number than who owe more than $50,000 in taxes. And there are good reasons for even those citizens who do have a Social Security number not to want to disclose it to the State Department and to all the other government agencies (including the DHS) with which it shares passport data.

Federal law and IRS regulations already imposed a $500 civil penalty for applying for a passport without providing a Social Security number. This was a high price to pay for freedom from travel dataveillance based on Social Security number. But it wasn’t always enforced (more “discretion”), and it was not a basis for denial of a passport. Now it is.

Why would someone who has a Social security number not want to give it to the State Department? The answer is obvious once you reverse the question: Why does the State Department want to record the Social Security number of each passport holder? And how do the State Department, and the other agencies with which it shares this data, plan to use it?

There’s a separate legal requirement and required form, which includes the passport number, for reporting any international transportation of $10,000 or more in cash or “monetary instruments”, either as accompanied baggage or in an unaccompanied shipment. So the State Department doesn’t need Social Security numbers in passport files to know whether large sums of money are being taken in or out of the country by the holder of a particular passport.

The new law doesn’t just require that you show that you have a valid Social Security number before you can receive or renew your passport. You must provide your Social Security number to the State Department, so that it can be entered into the passport records database.

Nor is your Social Security number used only to check with the IRS whether you are suspected of owing back taxes. The principal routine users of this data outside the State Department are the DHS, “for border patrol, screening, and security purposes.” Screening is, of course, a euphemism for algorithmic profiling and profile-based search and control.

In other words, the real point of requiring each US passport applicant to supply their Social Security number is to enable all the financial records linked to that Social Security number to be combined with the travel records linked to the passport number in the DHS “Automated Targeting System” and included in the inputs to the pre-crime “black box” that decides whether to give airlines and other common carriers permission to transport each US citizen, and how intrusively to search and/or interrogate each US citizen who is allowed to travel.

DHS Automated Targeting System records include many identifiers and pointers that can be used to link them to other databases: timestamped IP addresses, cellphone numbers, passport numbers, credit card numbers, names of emergency contacts and traveling companions, etc. But they haven’t yet contained Social Security numbers, so far as we know. Now they will, or will be linked to a related database that does.

Government records indexed by Social Security number aren’t just tax records, but records of your worldwide assets and financial affairs. Records identified by Social Security Number (but not passport number, so they would otherwise be at least somewhat more difficult for DHS to use for this profiling), include not only US bank accounts but also foreign bank accounts (reported by Social Security number on the required annual FBAR form) and other foreign “financial assets” (a partially overlapping category) required to be reported each year on IRS Form 8938.

None of this has anything to do with citizenship, which should be the sole criterion of entitlement (not merely “eligibility” at the government’s “discretion”) to a US passport.

What do you need to get a passport?

A duly completed passport application Form DHA-73. Your original SA identity document and a copy thereof. Two colour photographs that comply with the Passport and ID Photograph Specifications (NOT needed at smartcard offices as ID images are captured digitally)