A loophole in international aviation security came into broader view Sunday when the international police agency Interpol said its computer systems had contained information on the theft of two passports that were used to board an ill-fated Malaysia Airlines flight, but no national authorities had checked the database, according to the Associated Press.
"Passports are a very weak link'' in the world's travel security system, Michael Greenberger, a former Clinton administration official and director of the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security, said Sunday, the AP reported.
His comments came as investigators tried to determine if stolen passports used by two passengers played a role in Saturday's disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines flight bound for China with 239 on board, according to the AP.
Greenberger said that despite concerns raised by the 9/11 Commission in its report in 2004, there's still no effective way to ensure that the person presenting a passport is the one to whom it was issued, according to the AP.
More than 40 million travel documents, mostly passports, have been reported stolen or missing, according to a database begun in 2002 by the international law enforcement organization Interpol, the AP reported.
"Only a handful of countries worldwide are taking care to make sure that persons possessing stolen passports are not boarding international flights,'' Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said Sunday, according to the AP.
Interpol said that no country checked the two passports used to board the Boeing 777 bound from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, even though they were reported stolen in Thailand, the AP reported.
Authorities can't say how many other times the stolen Austrian and Italian passports may have been used, according to the AP.
The U.S. uses Interpol's database more than any other nation to screen people entering the country, the AP reported. Its 250 million annual checks are followed by the United Kingdom's 120 million and the United Arab Emirates' 50 million.
Interpol said it makes its database available to all 190 member countries but cannot force them to integrate it into their own systems, but last year, passengers boarded planes more than a billion times without having their passports screened against its database, according to the AP.
Had the Malaysia Airlines flight been headed to the United States, he said, the passenger manifest would have been checked before takeoff, primarily against the U.S. watchlist, the AP reported.
Since many nations neither maintain their own watchlists or check any list as carefully as the U.S, "if you're flying between two foreign airports, you're at the mercy of whatever the host and receiving countries are doing,'' Greenberger said, according to the AP.
Glenn Winn, an aviation security consultant and former head of security at United and Northwest airlines, said that a fake passport's quality is almost beside the point if authorities "don't even bother to check it or swipe it," the AP reported.
