Sun, Dec 13, 2009
Family Is No Threat To U.S. Security, Government Says
As many as 12 of Osama bin Laden's relatives hold pilot
certificates issued by the FAA, some received as little as three
months ago, according to records provided by Safe Banking
Systems.
ABC News reports that both the FAA and TSA say none of the
terrorists' relatives pose any threat to U.S. security. None are
thought to be "potential terrorists to harm the flying public." The
FAA did revoke the license held by Bakr bin Laden, Osama's half
brother, due to "security concerns." Bakr, along with another
half-brother Yeslam, are named in a lawsuit brought by families of
9/11 victims claiming they helped finance Osama bin Laden's al
Qaeda operation in the 1990's.
TSA, the agency charged with
clearing the 4 million people who hold some kind of FAA license,
says the process is complicated because of a lack of data in the
FAA database, such as dates of birth and addresses, as well as
typographical errors and multiple spellings of names that could be
'bin Laden'. TSA this summer finished checking all the names on the
pilot's list against the FBI's terrorist screening database, TSA
spokesperson Lauren Gaches told ABC News. "TSA now conducts the
name matching process for these nearly four million records on a
daily basis," she said.
But Mark Schiffer of Safe Banking Systems, a computer security
contracted to analyzed FAA records, says "The many different
spellings of bin Laden in the database make it impossible to
determine exactly who has a license. The information is so
thoroughly compromised that any vetting system built on it is
unreliable."
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