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Uncomfortably porous borders

By A TIMES EDITORIAL
Published June 1, 2007

Knock, knock. Who's there? The Department of Homeland Security has no idea. At least that's the implication after Homeland Security failed to stop an easily identifiable American citizen with a potentially deadly form of tuberculosis from boarding a flight in Europe and re-entering the United States.

After being notified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Homeland Security put the TB patient's name, Andrew Speaker of Atlanta, on a no-fly list and flagged his passport, notifying the Border Patrol to detain him if he tried to enter the country. Speaker has a highly drug-resistant form of TB, and any close contact he had with others, particularly in the confines of an aircraft cabin, could spread the disease.

Once the TB strain was identified, the CDC phoned Speaker in Italy and asked the honeymooning personal-injury lawyer (whose new father-in-law is a CDC microbiologist) not to leave until it sent a plane for him. He defied that request, as he and his wife traveled aboard commercial flights from Rome to Prague, on to Montreal, and then drove across the border without raising suspicion. Once home, he voluntarily entered medical isolation, though no one knows how many people he might have exposed to TB along the way.

The incident raises a number of questions about the nation's preparedness to respond effectively to a communicable disease threat or to secure our borders against an intruder, even one who is known. Homeland Security's excuses for failing to find and stop Speaker are hardly reassuring.

While the no-fly list ensnares plenty of law-abiding citizens who cannot remedy their mistaken inclusion on the list, Speaker had no trouble boarding his flight. He was already on his way to Montreal when Homeland Security was ready to act, Russ Knocke, the department's spokesman, told the Washington Post.

So why not stop Speaker at the airport? Homeland Security doesn't get real-time passenger data for flights to Canada, Knocke explained, making it "very difficult for us to know who might be traveling there." Besides, he said, "there is some indication of deceitfulness on the part of the individual."

Yes, those desperate to surreptitiously enter the country for whatever reason tend not to cooperate with authorities, which is why we have the Border Patrol. And it's not as though Speaker was a shadowy figure. The CDC had his medical records, cell phone number and passport information.

This incident doesn't bode well for the ongoing effort to secure our borders. Congress is going to hold a hearing on this security fiasco, but it is hard to imagine Americans getting any comforting answers.

[Last modified May 31, 2007, 22:39:57]