Dubai Stu

An attorney in my office recently represented in US federal court a Chinese national who got caught flying on a US domestic flight with a pretty good quality counterfeit Chinese passport. He had entered the US on a genuine passport and overstayed his visa letting his passport expire. He obtained the new document which purported to be current.

The forger did an acceptable job of forging the security laminate on the license, had done a pretty good job of sharpening up all the pages so none of the text or art work was blurry, used a pretty good paper, and did a nice job on the board covers. The various passport stamps and visas that were on the stamp pages were pretty good quality but on careful examination you could tell that the Malaysian "visa" had been printed on an inkjet printer. The paper did not illuminate correctly under black light and a TSA agent at DTW which doesn't have a special international terminal caught it. I wouldn't have given them that much credit.

If you are curious how I knew so much, I covered the probable cause hearing for the attorney who was out of town and chatted with the CBP document examiner who did the second tier examination of the document. US-CBP has a very high end scanner which compares the document with known exemplars of genuine, counterfeit, and altered passports from virtually every country (and other passport issuing entities such as the UN Refugee agency).

Anyway, I thought I'd share the story with as much detail as I could provide. While I have a number of issues with the TSA, I thought I would give this particular agent his "due."

gsoltso

Thank you for relaying this story, it is nice to see a positive story about TSA. I keep telling folks that we train quite a bit, and that we have situations like this show up from time to time, but that is not what most folks take away from the discussions here.

PlatinumScum

What does this have to do with transportation security?

FliesWay2Much

Exactly... It seems like a failure of ICE if the guy overstayed his visa. Mission creep dating back to Kippie declaring "ID matters."

DragonSoul

There are thousands of Chinese citizens living in countries around the world on fake passports, with fake credentials/ID/certificates. What's surprising is that one got caught.

wxman22

The fact is that TSA is supposed to check these things and they did. Kudos to them.
That this has nothing to do with our security, that's on the politicians, but then what would security theater be without their support!

JoeBas

And the Secret Service wrestled the fraudulent travel document to the ground...

Section 107

This is very true and DHS' document library grows by thousands of items every day, not just of genuine, counterfeit, and altered passports, but also of any and all travel and identity documents it can get its hands on, including visa stamps. It is an impressive operation.

nachtnebel

Seems tangential, at best. From the OP's title, I was expecting some special act of humanity from a TSA clerk, or a breakthrough where they find a way to screen passengers without genital searches. Alas, this doesn't rate a +1, IMO.

pa3lsvt

I feel safer now that the TSA caught a forged identification document from a passenger that presented no danger to flight safety in an operations post that performs no screening for WEI.

Now, when do they get to the point of improving WEI detection rates without handling my franks and beans?

FliesWay2Much

Not really -- the TSA took this mission creep on by themselves. If one goes back to the original implementing CFR and Federal Register notices, the only thing authorized in law concerning identification is the infamous Secure Flight program. A careful reading reveals that passengers must supply identifying data when making a reservation -- arguably been that way since the 1970s. The airline sends the manifest to the TSA. If you can print your BP at home, you're fine. If not, you're designated a terrorist and have to go to the ticket counter. Interestingly, the only time the CFR requires passengers to present identification at an airport is by exception when the TSA decides you're on a list. There has never been a legislated requirement for 100% ID checking just to get airside. Kippie initiated this back in circa 2007 by explaining that "ID matters." (That is a direct quote and have been trying like crazy to relocate the source.) Alas, Kippie's "ID matters" implementation did create jobs for hundreds of clerks and great security theater photo ops of the long lines and a clerk carefully scrutinizing someone's drivers license.

N830MH

Yes, they could be travel fraudulent. They would be deported. They will sent it back to China.

BSBD

That's not correct. Requiring passenger ID began in 1996 as an immediate knee-jerk "we need to do something!" reaction to the TWA Flight 800 crash. The ID requirement was implemented before anyone had any actual idea what happened to the aircraft. The airlines had already been pushing for it for years.

IDs have been required ever since. Had nothing to do with TSA or Kip Hawley.

FliesWay2Much

No -- this only was required for international flights and was not a requirement to enter the screening checkpoint. The lists were only used to notify next-of-kin in the event of another TWA-800 and to figure out how many funerals to have. The lists were destroyed after the aircraft landed at its destination. Yes, it was a nee-jerk reaction to TWA 800 but had nothing to do with security. As for the airlines, I would have to say that nearly 100% of FTers know that this was done for revenue protection. They ae more than happy to have the TSA do this for them.

BSBD

Again - not correct. The Clinton Administration's passenger ID regulation applied to all airline flights, international and domestic.