The fate of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 is still a mystery. It鈥檚 too soon to say if the plane and its 227 passengers and 12 crew were victims of mechanical failure, human error or terrorism.
Regardless, it鈥檚 disturbing to find that in this age of ubiquitous surveillance and immense databases, at least two of the passengers on the missing plane were travelling on stolen passports. How could something so blindingly obvious be overlooked?
Contact was lost with the Boeing 777 within a couple of hours after it took off from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing early Saturday. The search continues.
The Malaysian defence minister said four passengers on the missing plane had suspect identities, including two men travelling on stolen European passports. An Interpol official said the two men, thought to be Iranians, were likely seeking asylum in Europe and didn鈥檛 appear to be terrorists. The fact that no group or individual has taken credit for downing the aircraft indicates terrorism was probably not involved.
Nevertheless, the incident has exposed a weakness in airport security. Given the annoying procedures air travellers must endure even at Victoria鈥檚 modest and congenial airport, it鈥檚 amazing that people with stolen passports could succeed in getting on an international flight in a more unsettled part of the world.
Interpol, the international police agency, has a database of lost and stolen travel documents that contains 40 million records from 167 countries. Even though the database was searched 800 million times in 2013, about 40 per cent of international air passengers are not screened against the database. A check of the system would have shown that the two fraudulent passports used on the Malaysian flight were stolen in 2012 and 2013.
With the right software, it takes less than a second for a government to check a passport against the database, a service that has been available for more than 10 years, but only a handful of countries use it 鈥� mainly the United States, Britain and the United Arab Emirates.
Now Interpol is allowing two airlines, Air Arabia and Qatar Airways, to query the database on a test basis to ensure their passengers are carrying proper passports. The idea is to expand access to other airlines, as well as hotels and financial institutions.
Expanding access to the service to airlines makes sense, but why wouldn鈥檛 more countries, especially sa国际传媒, already be using it? It鈥檚 not as costly and invasive as other anti-terrorism procedures.
At airports around the world, travellers stand in long lines, walk through scanners, remove their belts and shoes, and stand in front of scanning machines. They and their bags are searched for anything that might be used as a weapon or an explosive device.
It鈥檚 annoying, time-consuming and adds to the cost of air travel, but we have come to accept it as a necessary component of the journey.
But the concept of focusing more on people and less on devices and substances needs to be a larger part of airport security, without abandoning sensible procedures.
The process should seek out aberrations, such as a dodgy passport, rather than regarding everyone as a suspect. The search for the needle in the haystack is made considerably more difficult by examining every straw.
While it seems at this point that terrorism is unlikely to be to blame for the missing Malaysian aircraft, the investigation has shown a gaping hole in airport security. Checking with Interpol for fraudulent passports should be standard procedure, in sa国际传媒 and elsewhere.
After doing all that it takes to get aboard a plane, travellers would like to be reassured their fellow passengers are really who they say they are.
