Identity theft easy for terrorists

New passport technologies might have helped

By Bob Sullivan MSNBC

Sept. 27 — In 1995, a Saudi exchange student named Abdulaziz Alomari at the University of Colorado reported a common burglary. Thieves broke into his apartment and made off with Alomari’s briefcase, his passport tucked inside. Six years later, that passport was quite possibly carried by a hijacker onto American Airlines Flight 11, the first to slam into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. In an age where marketing companies can track your every click on the Internet, how could a passport reported stolen six years ago be used to gain entry into the United States?

THAT’S JUST ONE of the questions that weigh heavily on the leaders of the International Civil Aviation Organization as it meets this week in Montreal. As the U.N. agency responsible for setting international passport guidelines, the group is at the cutting edge of international identity theft controls. For years, airlines, governments and the International Civil Aviation Organization have pondered the use of high-tech gizmos to track travelers across borders and foil passport-holding imposters. But with identity theft potentially a key tool used by the Sept. 11 hijackers, updating passports has a new urgency.        It’s unclear just how important a role identity theft played in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. Not long after the FBI published its list of the 19 hijackers, published reports discredited at least nine of the names as fake. Several alleged hijackers spoke to reporters in Arab newspapers, proclaiming they were alive, innocent, and the victims of identity theft. Others simply had the unhappy coincidence of having the same name as a hijacker.

But in at least two cases — Salem Alhazmi, allegedly on the flight that crashed into the Pentagon, and Abdulaziz Alomari, whose flight struck the World Trade Center’s north tower — identity theft victims told journalists their passports were stolen in burglaries several years ago. That raises the likelihood that the two hijackers entered the United States using false papers — in one case, papers that were stolen on U.S. soil. Why weren’t they stopped at the border?        Because no single worldwide agency keeps track of stolen passports, experts say. Local police in Colorado who received Alomari’s burglary report might have informed the Saudi Embassy — but the embassy wouldn’t routinely inform the U.S. State Department or the Immigration and Naturalization Service. And in the case of a passport stolen overseas, U.S. agencies are even less likely to hear about it.