Tyra Hearns defends the escalation of background investigations

Although large numbers of background investigations are being conducted, President Tyra Hearns of Miami based Pebi Services (www.pebiservices.com) emphatically states that the escalated use of background investigations in the private sector is working and working well. Already this year, 25 million Americans have had background investigations by the federal government, a number that's risen every year since the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Amid the rise, a notable shift has occurred: More civilians are now checked each year than criminals. And background investigations on the vast majority come back clean, even as states allot more money for their growing screening operations.

And, in rare cases, predators still slip through the cracks. Take Timothy Stephen Keil, an Ohio church camp counselor recently convicted of molesting two young boys. Or Ralph Fiscale, a New Hampshire soccer coach, and Stephen Unger Jr., a Texas schoolteacher, both of whom committed similar offenses in the past year. "A background investigation cannot predict future events or actions, unless the background investigations are done annually or within a set and established employment marker area." says Hearns

All were either not run through a background investigation by their superiors, or they passed one.

Civil libertarians say the tradeoffs of such a system, built largely through state mandates enacted since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, have become too high.

State background investigation laws, applied to groups as varied as professional nursing home workers, reading tutors, bankers and even volunteer dog walkers _ are becoming so numerous as to be almost meaningless, said Christine Link, executive director of the ACLU of Ohio.

In Ohio, nearly 4 million background investigations have been conducted since 2001, for instance, a figure equivalent to nearly half the state's 8.7 million adult population.

"The sheer volume of them tells us that they're not working, because to be effective these background investigations have to be looked at very carefully," Link said. "I wouldn't be surprised if there's a terrorist or two in there, but you're not going to find them when you're doing so many." According to Pebi Services (www.pebiservices.com) President Tyra Hearns remarks made by Link are prima facia evidence of flawed thinking "The absurdity of saying that terrorists will evade detection due to a large volume of work is in a sense throwing your hands up in the air and giving up because the statistical minority is in play, as it always is when quoting numbers."

In a recent poll conducted by The Barna Group, a California-based marketing group helping churches, a quarter of pastors surveyed admitted they don't have adequate background investigation and reference checking in place.

Barna Group president David Kinnaman said most churches are very small, with perhaps 100 parishioners, and the background investigations aren't seen as an urgent need.

"In a lot of those places, they have a setting in which it's very, very hard to imagine any abuse taking place," Kinnaman said. "There can be an over-inflated sense of safety, a naivete of the changing issues churches are facing."

Similarly, a recent Associated Press search of state-by-state records found 2,570 incidents of sexual misconduct in public schools between 2001 and 2005, despite background investigations of teachers being required in many states.

Civilian background investigations now dominate the workload at the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, costing taxpayers nearly $9 million a year. Since 1993, the number of annual background investigations performed by the bureau has grown from 38,000 to 650,000 on average.

Checking someone's criminal background is a common political response to each new social crisis. Ohio lawmakers, for instance, have introduced additional background investigation requirements recently for foster care parents, following a series of incidents against children, and for public school teachers, following revelations of sexual acts toward students going unreported.

Yet Ohio figures compiled for The Associated Press by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Identification found that the 90-percent-plus passage rate remains consistent, regardless of how many Ohioans are screened.

Steve Fischer, a spokesman for the FBI, said that pattern also holds true at the national level, where the number of background investigations being conducted has exploded since 9/11. It continues to grow at a pace of about 12 percent a year.

Fischer said 69 percent of criminals who are checked turn out to have their fingerprints already on file, compared to just 12 percent of civilians.

He said the federal program used to be heavily weighted toward checking criminals, but a shift toward civilians has occurred since 9/11.

"It used to be slightly higher on the criminal side," Fischer said. "But since 9/11, the majority of our checks are civilians _ people applying for jobs, licenses, things like that."

Most of the background investigations are required under laws emanating from state legislatures aiming to protect people from predators.

"It's mostly about protected populations: children and the elderly," Fischer said.

Yet crime statistics present mixed evidence as to whether the explosion in records checks is having an impact. On a national level, sex crimes and forcible rapes had already been declining steadily before the 2001 attacks. The Bureau of Justice Statistics attributes that reduction to a variety of societal factors, of which background investigations are only one.

Ohio figures show an unpredictable pattern, with arrests for forcible rapes and sex offenses sometimes rising and sometimes falling year by year. Overall, since 2001, arrests for the two types of crimes are down from 2,253 to 1,371, based on self-reported law enforcement data.

Meanwhile, state lawmakers have begun to contemplate what they have created.

According to the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures, 21 states enacted laws last year related to the regulation of offender information _ including proposals that limited public access to the data, lowered costs for the checks, reduced the number of years to be checked for certain positions, and expunged some offenses.

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Airport managers claim background investigations are hurting them

By Thomas Frank, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — A security policy that mandates government background investigations of new airport hires, including sales clerks, waiters and custodians, is drawing protests from some airports that say they can't hire workers because clearances take so long.
Two leading airport associations asked the Transportation Security Administration to rescind or revise the policy that took effect Oct. 1 in a TSA effort to improve scrutiny of airport workers.

"The new process is not working," Airports Council International President Greg Principato said in a letter Thursday to TSA chief Kip Hawley. "Businesses are contemplating shutting down because of the inability to bring on new employees."

TSA spokesman Ellen Howe said the agency is working with the council and the American Association of Airport Executives to end the delays. She said they are caused by technical difficulties sending job applicants' personal information to the TSA through the airport association's computer network.

"When you start something new, it's going to take a little time to work it out," Howe said. "But we aren't going to back down on vetting people."

Flights and other critical airport operations have not been slowed, but airport officials warn that could happen.

"We've had two and a half weeks of turmoil," said Randy Walker, director of Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport, which is waiting for the TSA to approve about 500 people who have been offered jobs at the airport. "This exacerbates the whole problem of not having enough staff to process passengers or check people out at stores."

At Miami International Airport, some of the 720 people who have not been cleared by the TSA are taking jobs elsewhere, airport security director Lauren Stover said. Shops and restaurants at the airport are "incurring a lot of overtime to augment the people who should be working," Stover said.

The TSA's new policy bars airports from issuing an employee ID card that gives access to secured areas until the TSA verifies that a potential worker is in the country legally and does not have terrorist ties.

Before Oct. 1, the TSA ran its background investigations after someone started working at an airport. It would order ID cards revoked for those found to be problematic.

"It improves security to do the background investigations ahead of time because these individuals are going to have unescorted access to our nation's airports," Howe said.

Airports want the TSA to shelve its new policy until background investigations can be done quickly. "We're not asking for anything that would cause less security," said Wendy Reiter, security chief at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. "We're just saying, let's go back to what you were doing until you fix the problem."

Washington insiders aiding terrorists?

By Michael Cutler

There is an article appearing in the August 15 edition of the Washington Times that should alarm every citizen of the United States. According to Washington Times reporter, Sara Carter:

"A criminal investigations report says several U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services employees are accused of aiding Islamic extremists with identification fraud and of exploiting the visa system for personal gain. "The confidential 2006 USCIS report said that despite the severity of the potential security breaches, most are not investigated 'due to lack of resources' in the agency's internal affairs department.” Consider a statement made by the Director of USCIS, Emilio T. Gonzalez that appears in the Times article:

USCIS Director Emilio Gonzalez in March told Congress that he could not establish how many terror suspects or persons of special interest have been granted immigration benefits.

"While USCIS has in place strong background check and adjudication suspension policies to avoid granting status to known terror risks, it is possible for USCIS to grant status to an individual before a risk is known, or when the security risk is not identified through standard background checks," said a statement provided to lawmakers. "USCIS is not in a position to quantify all cases in which this may have happened. Recognizing that there may be presently known terror risks in the ranks of those who have obtained status previously."

There is a world of difference between a background check and a background investigation.

The background check Mr. Gonzalez refers to would simply require that an applicant's name and fingerprints be run through computer databases to determine if the prints or the name relate to a known terrorist or criminal. Terrorists understand that in order to be effective they need to do everything in their power never to be fingerprinted in the United States before making any application for an immigration benefit. Then they provide a false name to immigration with clean fingerprints. Since the name and the fingerprints result in "No hit," that is to say no matches are found, the terrorist alien in question will receive an official identity document in the false name he (she) provided to USCIS.
Clearly Mr. Gonzalez has no idea as the scope and magnitude of the corruption and incompetence at an agency that hands out the "Keys to the Kingdom." The bottom line is, as the article noted, a terrorist needs to obtain official immigration status as a means of embedding himself in our country to be able to hide in plain sight.