TB Traveler Reveals Security Problems, Critics Charge

WASHINGTON — Atlanta attorney Andrew Speaker's ability to travel freely into and out of the United States despite orders to detain him because he is infected with incurable tuberculosis has exposed flaws in homeland security that could be exploited by terrorists, critics warned Friday.

"It says the system failed," said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security.

"Better safeguards have to be in place," said Thompson, who has scheduled a committee hearing for Wednesday to investigate the incident. "We knew this individual had this illness. We knew where he was located. We had all the telephone numbers. Yet the system did not intercept him until he got back into the country."

The fact that Speaker was able to book a flight from Prague to Montreal despite being on a no-fly list, to land and depart the Canadian airport unnoticed, and then drive into New York state revealed a "loophole that needs to be fixed," said David Heyman, a homeland security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"It's an example to others that this is a path into the country," said Heyman.

But federal security officials said the breakdown came only with a single border guard who ignored explicit orders to stop Speaker.

"Actually the system itself worked," said Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. DHS has a record of customs and border protection agencies getting the needed information about Speaker from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and making it available to all U.S. port officers. This included information that Speaker had a ticket for a return flight to Atlanta where he would likely have been met and detained. But Speaker changed flights.

Because the flight from Prague to Montreal did not cross U.S. airspace, U.S. officials did not get that passenger list, Knocke said. But when Speaker crossed the border at Champlain, N.Y., his passport was "swiped" at an electronic reader and explicit instructions popped up on a computer screen to detain and isolate him, Knocke said.

The problem came "during that two-minute interaction" between the federal border agent and suspected disease carrier, he said. "We have launched an investigation into what happened at the port of entry. There is a possibility of human error."

Had Speaker been a known terrorist suspect on no-fly lists, Knocke said, "we have protocols in place with the Canadian government" that would have resulted in "pings" on the U.S. system when he booked the flight from Prague.

"We don't know what no-fly list he was put on," said Thompson. "We don't know if Canadian officials were notified in a timely enough manner to intercept the individual when he landed in Montreal. There are a lot of questions still unanswered."

The chairman said his committee will summon DHS and CDC officials, among others, to get these answers.

"We will try to keep as much of the hearing open to the public as possible, but there has been a request (from DHS) that portions of it be classified," Thompson said. "This situation rises to the level where you have to reassure the public that corrective measures have been put in place to the extent that it won't happen again."

Jay Ahearn, a top official for Customs and Border Protection, said Friday that steps are already being taken to prevent a repeat.

"We are very confident that the system worked effectively in flagging the individual when he came across the U.S.-Canada border," Ahearn said. "We had a breakdown with an individual border officer who waved Speaker through."

Ahearn declined to describe the border officer involved except to say he had been employed by the agency for a while and that the case was now the subject of an internal investigation.

"We're going to evaluate everything in our system, in our whole protocol, to make sure there are redundancies," he said.

Heyman said the system should have contained electronic backstops to prevent a single border guard from waving through someone whose detention has been ordered. "As soon as that passport gets a hit, there should be a flow of information" electronically to alert federal and state agencies that the individual has crossed the border and "we need to find that person now," the security expert explained.

Heyman said the case also lends credence to the U.S. position in a debate with European countries over the sharing and retention of airline passenger lists. The Europeans have been against the practice for privacy reasons while the United States has favored greater sharing and retention of these records for security reasons, as ways to check travel patterns of terrorists.

"Here is a clear example where you can actually protect peoples' health" by retaining passenger lists so those who traveled with Speaker can be found, tested and treated, Heyman said. "We need to know who was traveling when and where."

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said the incident also points out the need for more border guards.

"Today it was one very sick and very irresponsible person who slipped through, but tomorrow could bring much worse," said Schumer. "There is just no excuse for this. God forbid this was someone bent on doing us harm – we simply must have more border guards, with better safety protocols, doing a better job."

As of nine months ago, Schumer said, the nation's northern border was 1,428 officers short of the 4,845 agents required by the USA Patriot Act. He called for a Government Accountability Office investigation into this staffing situation.

Heyman said the case revealed other security issues beyond the lack of border control.

"The notion that an infected individual can travel at will in the airline system is obviously dangerous to public health," he said. "There is potential for a bioterrorist to do this maliciously."

The incident also brings up questions about communications between health officials around the world, he said. "The ability to act rapidly upon knowledge that you have a critical situation is just not there yet."

If Speaker had been more infectious — with a pandemic flu strain, for instance — "they would clearly have failed to stop him," said Heyman. "And he used neither stealth nor deceit."

"This incident highlights how vulnerable our security remains more than 5 years after 9/11 and raises considerable doubts about the nation's preparedness for pandemic influenza and other biological incidents," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, ranking minority member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. It "only reinforces my concern about our nation's ability to cope with a major outbreak, whether naturally occurring, as in this case, or intentional."

But some experts think it unlikely that terrorists would chose such biological weapons.

A suicide bioterrorist killing by coughing out deadly, indestructible germs "makes for great Tom Clancy kind of stuff" but would not create the instant panic and fear that just setting off a car bomb in Times Square would, said James Carafano, a homeland security fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. "You've got to ask yourself, 'What would a reasonable terrorist do?'"