…put your hands against the wall and spread your feet apart. The people charged with preventing another Al Queda attack in the United States have been extremely concerned about the potential of terrorists using of fraudulent Visa Waiver passports to enter the country. The potential is so great that there has been a move to force all visa waiver countries to institute biometric checks (e.g. facial recognition) into passports. Until today it seemed to me that was indeed the biggest hole for people coming from overseas.

Yes, I said, until today.

I was in Secondary Inspections today when I picked up a European visa waiver passport that a rookie primary officer had sent back for verification. For whatever reason, he didn’t like it.

When I opened it up and looked and the “biopage” – the page containing the photo, name, dob and other info – I instantly agreed. For the first five seconds it just wasn’t right – it just looked… “bad”. Thereafter I was began a list of reasons I could “articulate”: the paper was too thick and ridged; the background was slightly off color; the fine line printing wasn’t crisp enough; printed lines of text were smeared over the photo; security perforations on the back of the page did not pass thru to the front – they were printed on the front.

A supervisor checked three databases and determined the true owner of the passport and his previous travels. The names didn’t match and our passenger didn’t know where the passport had been or when.

Time elapsed in secondary: 3 minutes.

I went to the Document Lab and found a report on this exact model of fraud from the country in question and from that was able to identify a few more characteristics.

Under questioning the passenger maintained that it was his legitimately issued passport. His consulate was contacted and the response came back that the passport had been stolen in 2002. When confronted with the fax from the passport office the passenger admitted that he had purchased the document for about 700 Euro.

There’s no overtime because of budget restraints so I had to leave before the case was finished. It’s unclear whether this passenger is a terrorist or just a person of middle eastern origin traveling on a fraudulent European passport. We may not know for weeks.

The message for me is this: even relatively untrained rookie border guards are catching the best counterfeits on the market. The message for terrorists is this: if you’re avoiding New York and Washington because the security is too tight, come to San Francisco – we’ll be happy to turn you over to the FBI.