Tightening airport ID screening loopholes

Last month a wanted murderer escaped authorities by boarding an international flight with a shoddy fake ID revealing a continuing weakness of airport security.

While DHS has invested heavily in passenger screening and preventing terrorists from bringing weapons aboard passenger planes, little has been done to screen passengers using fake IDs.

Luis Guaman was wanted by local police for murdering a woman and her son in Brockton, Massachusetts, but he successfully boarded a flight bound for Ecuador using the passport of a twenty-six year old man.

Despite being forty years old and bearing little resemblance to the man in the photo, security screeners at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport waived him through.

Douglas R. Laird, the former security director for Northwest Airlines and president of an aviation security consulting firm, said, “There is nothing in place right now, that I’m aware of, where that [Transportation Security Administration] agent can do anything with that passport other than look at it. They can’t scan it through a reader and tell if it’s good or not. That’s a weakness.’’

Security administrators maintain that this security vulnerability does not make planes any less safe as passengers and their bags are thoroughly screened, but it does allow malicious actors or terrorists to enter the United States using forged documents.

Greg Soule, a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) spokesman, said, “TSA’s top priority is the safety of the traveling public. Every day TSA screens nearly 2 million passengers and utilizes many layers of security to keep our nation’s transportation systems secure. Every passenger passes through multiple layers of security, to include thorough screening at the checkpoint.’’

TSA screeners have limited tools at their disposal to verify an individual’s documents and largely rely on a magnifying glass, a blacklight, and their eyes. Screeners are also given basic training in facial recognition, but must make quick comparisons of an individual’s face to a photo that can be years old.

Laird says, “If you don’t have a system where you can scan the passport, that tells you through technology if it’s good or bad, you’ve got a problem. You don’t really know who it is.’’

The 9/11 Commission recommended securing borders by mandating the use of biometrics to screen people both entering and exiting the country.

Al Felzenberg, the former spokesman for the 9/11 Commission, believes that using biometrics to screen passengers would minimize the risk of terrorists using fake documents to enter the United States.

“We should have a sense of knowing who’s leaving, who’s coming, and how often. There are more sophisticated ways to do this, and if it’s a priority for the government, it should be done,” he said.

Airlines currently check the names and birthdates of all passengers entering and exiting the country against the FBI’s watch list and no-fly list, and under the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology system DHS collects biometric data on foreigners entering the country.

Under the program, foreigners’ fingerprints and photographs are recorded and every time they enter the country their information is scanned against a large inter-governmental database to identify if the person in question is a suspected terrorist, criminal, or illegal immigrant.

Richard W. Bloom, an aviation security and counterterrorism expert, is not too worried about the most recent airport incident involving fake IDs. While more can be done to make the system more difficult for people to sneak through, he does not believe in the idea of a 100 percent fool-proof system.

“Regardless of how good a security program is, there is going to be a base rate of things happening,’’ he said.

According to Soule, last year the TSA apprehended 200 people attempting to board flights using fake identification.