Eideard

An Anchorage police officer accused of being an illegal immigrant using a fake identity has been arrested and charged with passport fraud, federal prosecutors said on Friday.

The Anchorage Police Department patrolman known as Rafael Espinoza is in truth a Mexican citizen named Rafael Mora-Lopez, said Karen Loeffler, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Alaska.

The false identity was discovered after Mora-Lopez, 47, sought renewal of his passport, Loeffler said, and used suspicious information that triggered an investigation by the State Department and other federal agencies.

“We discovered that there were two people using all of the same identifiers,” she said.

Mora-Lopez was arrested on Thursday, immediately after the use of Espinoza’s identity was confirmed, and discharged from his job, Loeffler said.

Anchorage Police Chief Mark Mew said Mora-Lopez, posing as Espinoza, passed all background checks when he was hired in 2005, including fingerprint checks. Mew described Mora-Lopez as a “sterling” officer with a good reputation and a “very professional” manner.

Must have been a very “professional” fingerprint check, too.

A bizarre case of a young Asian man successfully boarding a plane disguised as an elderly Caucasian man has the governments in Hong Kong and in Canada scrambling to review their security procedures at airports and placed an airline under scrutiny for its passenger screening procedures.

The story of the Asian man in his 20s who stowed away aboard a Hong Kong-to-Vancouver flight continues to play prominently in newspapers and TV news broadcasts as well. And it has captivated a public puzzled over how screening staff at airports would fail to halt a person who wore a silicone mask disguised to be significantly older than his actual age of a different race…

What is known is that the man boarded the plane wearing the disguise and presenting a U.S. passport of a Caucasian man born in 1955. The aging face contrasted with the traveler’s “young-looking hands,” according to a Canadian Border Service bulletin issued over the case. Sometime during the flight the man removed his disguise, further alerting airplane staff who notified the Canadian authorities. Border officers met the man as he arrived in Vancouver…

Golly! They actually noticed the difference.

No link to terrorism has been suggested in the case.

Phew! I’m glad I needn’t worry about that for another day or two.

RTFA and you can add all the excuses to your list of Homeland Insecurity favorites.

The U.S. government agency that prints passports has for years failed to resolve persistent concerns about the security risks involved in outsourcing production to foreign factories.

“On a number of levels this is extremely troubling,” said Clark Kent Ervin, a former inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security. “Something like that ought to be produced only in the United States, under only the most rigorous security standards.”

Despite repeated assurances they would move production to the U.S., a key government contractor has continued to assemble an electronic component of the nation’s new, more sophisticated passport in Thailand…

The Thai factory was one of several concerns raised in an inspector general’s audit earlier this year that looked into the way the GPO is producing the new e-passport – a passport that is supposed to be impenetrable to counterfeiters because it stores information on an embedded computer chip that is tucked into the cover.

Experts agree that passport production is a critical homeland security concern, given that possession of an American passport can help a traveler bypass some of the stringent reviews conducted of those entering the U.S. from abroad. Ervin described the document as an EZ-pass into the United States, something officials say terrorists know all too well.

GPO’s inspector general has warned that the agency lacks even the most basic security plan for ensuring that blank e-Passports — and their highly sought technologies – aren’t stolen by terrorists, foreign spies, counterfeiters and other bad actors as they wind through an unwieldy manufacturing process that spans the globe and includes 60 different suppliers.

RTFA – and face up to the reality that years of incompetent management by fools like Bush and creeps like Cheney will take forever to unravel and get sorted. Outsourcing the components for something as significant as passport production to 60 companies around the world is the ultimate in corporate cronyism.

We probably need a special agency established just to investigate and correct the economic crimes and corruption the current administration inherited from the days of Republican control of our government.

Starting this summer, Americans will need passports to travel to Canada, Mexico, Bermuda, and the Caribbean–unless they have passport cards or one of the enhanced driver’s licenses that the states of Washington and New York have begun to issue.

Valid only for trips by land and sea, these new forms of identification are a convenient, inexpensive option for people who don’t need to travel by plane. U.S. passport cards, which were introduced in July, cost about half as much as a full passport, and the extra cost of getting an enhanced driver’s license rather than a regular one is even lower. Enhanced licenses have been available in Washington since January 2008 and in New York since September; other border states, including Michi­gan, Vermont, and Arizona, intend to offer them as well.

But not everyone is convinced that the new IDs are a good idea. The passport card and the enhanced licenses contain radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, which are microchips fitted with antennas. An RFID reader can radio a query to the tag, causing it to return the data it contains–in this case, an identification number that lets customs agents retrieve information about the cardholder from a government database.

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