August 1, 2011 Last week, an official investigation by the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General confirmed extensive problems with the FAA and TSA pilot license vetting systems reported on in August 2009 New York Times article, then on October 9, 2009 by ABC News and later in 2010 in The Enterprise Report (TER).
Security experts say the TSA's job is complicated by the fact that the FAA aviation database does not contain vital information such as addresses and dates of birth, and is rife with misspelled names.
The IG report cited the names of seven U.S. licensed pilots with ties to terrorists reported in the media using information obtained from a June 2009 report by Safe Banking Systems, a Long Island, New York private data processing company that first uncovered the major security flaws. For instance, bin Laden is spelled several different ways in the FAA records, including "Binladin," "Ben Laden," and "Benladen."
"The many different spellings of bin Laden in the data make it impossible to determine exactly who has a license," said Mark Schiffer of Safe Banking systems, a computer security firm that analyzed the FAA records.
Safe Banking Systems (SBS) President David Schiffer said his team uncovered the cases in which the FAA had failed to revoke the licenses and certificates for more than a dozen notorious criminals, including convicted terrorists, major drug traffickers, and even a producer of a biological Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) by cross-checking the FAA's public data base with information on suspect individuals. SBS also discovered that at least 12 members of Osama bin Laden's family currently hold FAA pilot's licenses. "I am glad the government is finally taking notice of our public service work in exposing these flaws in their vetting process," said David Schiffer of SBS.
The DHS Inspector General's probe was prompted by a congressional request by the Senate's Commerce Committee in early 2010. A bi-partisan group of Senators who signed a letter to DHS Inspector General Richard Skinner, included Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) said the cases in media reports called into question the ability of the FAA and the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) to detect and purge high risk individuals posing a threat to "transportation and national security" from the list of approved pilots.
The June 2009 SBS report included the man in prison for blowing up Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The man, who at the time was a licensed aircraft dispatcher, was listed on his FBI wanted poster as Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi, but by the F.A.A. as Abdelbaset Ali Elmegrahi.
The FBI has offered a $50,000 reward for a Seattle man Joseph Mahmoud Dibee, 31 a domestic terrorist. the suspect has not lost his pilot’s license and has reportedly tried to sell his airplane online. Dibee was indicted with 10 other people in January 2006, in Eugene, Oregon on charges of arson, destroying an electric tower and other acts of domestic terrorism. An FBI official says Mr. Dibee may have fled to Syria.
Seven FAA pilot license holders have ties to Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout and his air cargo transportation businesses. The United States and the United Nations have accused Viktor Bout of supplying arms to countries around the world. In 2008, Bout was indicted for attempting to supply South American terrorists with surface-to-air missiles and other weapons.
Other disturbing finding by the IG include that the FAA had Social Security numbers of only about 750,000 people out of the 1.3 million names in its Registry, and that among those for whom it had numbers, more than 15,000 of them did not match the Social Security database for name, sex or date of birth.
By law, the FAA cannot require a Social Security number, according to the DHS IG report, and as a result, “TSA may not identify U.S. citizens who have provided false biographic information to receive an airman certificate.”
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