It's the largest police investigation in history, with a few thousand sleuths hot on the trail of just 19 suspected hijackers, and about 500 people already in jail.
But the FBI said in a statement on Thursday that "attempts to confirm the true identities of these individuals are still under way."
The bureau released 19 grainy snapshots of the men it believes conducted the Sept. 11 attacks, and Attorney General John Ashcroft pressed Americans to join a "national neighborhood watch" that might give the Feds any more info on the terrorists.
The fact that a legion of detectives can't conclusively decide who those 19 men were indicates just how difficult it is -- even in our database-friendly times -- to pin down something so slippery as one's identity. Identity theft, which was seen as an irritating consequence of modern life before Sept. 11, is now seen as a potential threat to national security.
"We've already felt it. They're already calling," said Jerry Janik, chairman of the Nexus group, which makes biometric recognition systems for government agencies.
The government "knows they're vulnerable, and we know they're vulnerable. They know that in order to protect the average American, they're going to have to do a lot better."
In addition to being masters of destruction, it appears that the hijackers were also well-versed in deception, fooling authorities from even beyond the grave. After the FBI first released the hijackers' names, several people in the Middle East said that they'd pegged the wrong people. Some people on the FBI's list, it was said, were alive and well.
While some of these were cases of mistaken identity, it turned out that at least two of the names released matched exactly with people who had their passports stolen in burglaries several years ago.
For example, the FBI said that a man named Abdulaziz Alomari with a birthdate of Dec. 24, 1972 was on the flight that hit the North Tower.
But a man by that name and birthdate told a Saudi Arabian newspaper last week that when he was studying electrical engineering at the University of Colorado in 1995, a briefcase containing his passport was stolen from his apartment. According to MSNBC, a man named Salem Alhazmi, who was reported to have been on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, also said that he'd had his passport stolen.
It's not clear that the hijackers used these passports. But there is no central database of passports, said Bernie Ashe, the CEO of AiT, which makes technology to provide governments with ways to secure travel documents. At the very least, he said, this lack of a central list of stolen or missing passports could frustrate the efforts of law enforcement agencies trying to prevent known terrorists from coming into the country.
Identity theft is not only an international problem. According to the FBI, it was the fastest growing white-collar crime of 1999 within the United States. "There were 700,000 cases," Janik said, "some of them potentially crippling situations. For one guy I know it was so serious -- the guy who stole his identity even sold his house."
The reason such incidents can occur, he said, is all those databases out there are stuffed with people's personal information. "For $20, you can find out anything you want about someone," Janik said. "Computers have allowed us a great deal of freedom, but now you can collect a lot of information on us -- it's really exposed us to people who want to claim our identity. You can go to a DMV and say, 'I'm so-and-so, I've lost my license,' and they'll take your picture and give you a new license. It's that easy."
Indeed, on Thursday, the California State Auditor released a report that said in the past year, "an unknown number" of licenses got into the hands of "people who managed to outwit the issuing system."
The report said that although the DMV had been collecting drivers' fingerprints for the past 20 years, California's DMV "does not obtain the benefits of such technology" because many of its fingerprints are of poor quality. Sophisticated imaging software could be used to scan them into a database, but the department doesn't have enough money to do that.
But Janik predicted that the money will now flow into DMVs and other agencies charged with maintaining citizens' identity, as this has now become an area of national focus.
Janik, in fact, predicts that in the not too distant future, biometrics devices like face- or fingerprint-scanners will be everywhere -- at banks, airports, supermarkets, homes, offices, everywhere -- and people will come to regard them as normal. What of privacy concerns, or the fear of surveillance?
Such issues will cease to matter when security -- both physical and financial -- are on the line, he said. "Consumers will welcome it. The computers are already housing tons of information on us. We have no idea who's looking at our information. If we make it so that you have to have a face match to get that information, there's accountability to you. Right now there isn't any."
