Since the 9/11 attacks, the Department of Homeland Security has spent billions of dollars securing America’s airports. But an investigation published exclusively by The Daily on Monday shows a significant gap still remains.
With just a few clicks of a mouse and a transfer of cash, anyone willing to skirt the law can obtain counterfeit driver’s licenses, which experts say can get anyone right past security and onto an airplane.
A handful of overseas companies sell phony IDs for about $200 apiece to anyone willing to upload a digital photo and wire the cash, whether they are kids looking for booze or terrorists looking to board a commercial aircraft.
The fakes feature the same state-of-the-art holograms and bar codes used by real state licenses and are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. Experts say that is especially true when the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is doing the checking.
“They’re literally just looking at what’s printed on the front of the driver’s license and making sure it matches the boarding pass,” according to Williams, the chief executive of Intellicheck Mobilisa, a contractor for the Department of Defense and Air Force One.
The Daily recently purchased four high-quality fake IDs from a website based in China and asked Williams to analyze them.
The IDs — two counterfeit Connecticut driver’s licenses and another two for British Columbia — easily passed a visual inspection.
“To the naked eye, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference,” Williams said after analyzing the IDs.
Although the bar codes on the British Columbia licenses would not have passed a simple computer test, Williams said the Connecticut licenses were convincing enough to get whoever bought them onto a plane.
“Absolutely,” Williams said. “No doubt in my mind.”
Both Homeland Security and the TSA declined to respond to requests for comment.
The TSA recently announced that it will begin testing new ID verification technology at select airports this year. The publicly disclosed specifications for the system say it will use computer algorithms to examine “bar codes, magnetic stripes, embedded circuits and machine-readable text” to determine whether documents are authentic.
(Source: NY Post)
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The whole TSA is a huge waste of resources and a drain on the economy, and has not saved even a single life. We have done to ourselves more damage than the terrorists ever did or could do.