Passport Fraud: an International Vulnerability

Travel document security is a cornerstone of the United States effort to secure our homeland. It is integral to pushing our borders out. The ability of terrorists and others who would seek to do us harm hinges, in large part, on the ability to travel, and if you make it hard for terrorists to cross our borders without being detected, future acts of terrorism hopefully can be prevented. Today we conduct more vigorous vetting earlier in the process, station DHS personnel in high-risk countries, and use biometrics to detect visa fraud. In the years after 2001, INTERPOL created a lost and stolen travel document database that gives countries a mechanism both to send the information to a central depository and to check against that database to make sure no one could enter a country or board a plane with a known lost or stolen passport. Unfortunately, only three countries in the world routinely check flight manifests against that database: The United States; the United Kingdom; and the United Arab Emirates. Vulnerabilities in our document security can be exploited by those who would do us harm. So we must have robust measures in place to deter and to ultimately detect those traveling on false documents.