Oversight of flight licenses for terrorist

NY Times:

At least six men suspected or convicted of crimes that threaten national security retained their federal aviation licenses, despite antiterrorism laws written after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that required license revocation. Among them was a Libyan sentenced to 27 years in prison by a Scottish court for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie.

In response to questions from The New York Times, the Transportation Security Administration, which is supposed to root out such individuals, announced that the Federal Aviation Administration suspended the licenses on Thursday.

The two agencies appeared to be unaware that the men were among the nearly one million people licensed as pilots, mechanics and flight dispatchers. They were identified by a tiny family-owned company in Mineola, N.Y., demonstrating software it developed to scrub lists of bank customers for terrorism links.

The list also includes an Iranian-American convicted of trying to send jet fighter parts to Iran and a Lebanese citizen living near Detroit who was convicted of trying to provide military equipment to Hezbollah.

David M. Schiffer, president of the database company, Safe Banking Systems, said his list of terrorists or terrorism suspects was drawn entirely from public records. The F.A.A. records are also mostly public, although because of data entry and programming flaws, some information is inaccessible and other data is garbled.

...

Mining databases for clues about terrorism is a central element of counterterrorism, although one that is frequently criticized because of concerns about privacy and the potential for error. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon considered the idea of mining commercial databases like credit card transactions and phone records to look for links to terrorists; an outcry among civil libertarians and members of Congress blocked that. But the links found by Safe Banking Systems are entirely from public information.

Congress created the Transportation Security Administration and moved it, along with the F.A.A.’s intelligence operations, to the Homeland Security Department. But the move apparently did not eliminate glitches in interdepartmental communication, a problem that was highlighted by the success of terrorists on Sept. 11.

The T.S.A. appears not to have taken notice of the terrorists even when two of them turned up on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Ten Most Wanted List.

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There is more.

What the story demonstrates is how inertia in the bureaucracy inhibits the kind of checks that seem obvious to those outside that environment. It comes from being too focused on pushing paper and not rewarding those who ask questions about why certain things are not done. This provides a niche for people like Schiffer and his company.

BTW, he is performing the kind of oversight that the media used to perform in ask questions that have been overlooked by the bureaucracy. When I read the lead I thought the Times had uncovered this oversight, before coming to the paragraph on the tip they got from Schiffer. Perhaps in the future it will be someone like Schiffer who reveals this in a blog.