Security issues coalesce at insecure O'Hare

People who have flown regularly since Sept. 11, 2001, often roll their eyes at the notion that asking grandmothers to remove their tennis shoes somehow makes their flights more safe.

And despite increasingly tougher travel requirements, including passports where driver's licenses used to do, knowledge of growing and rampant identity theft has left more than a few questioning the efficacy of efforts to tighten entry points.

The cynical or the realistic, depending on one's point of view, have always questioned the notion that the nation's inability to control its borders brought only an illegal work force, and no real threat.

This week, all those issues coalesced at O'Hare International Airport, where Chicago, state and federal authorities arrested 23 illegal immigrants who worked for Ideal Staffing Solutions Inc. of Bensenville. They stand accused of using fake IDs in critical and supposedly secure areas of the airport.

Mary Gurin, 36, of Carpentersville, was among two Ideal employees charged with a federal count of harboring illegal aliens and of misuse of Social Security numbers. Federal officials said she knowingly hired an illegal alien and signed that employee's security badge.

Her involvement is likely to fuel more heated debate in Carpentersville, where illegal immigration has ignited raucous debate over the past year. And it is likely to heighten the conflict between the federal government and the state of Illinois, which has banned employers from using electronic services to help assure legal employees. As but one example of the fallout, Elgin has had to stop using Basic Pilot, which it had used to verify the legality of its work force.

Beyond those broader issues, though, it is far more critical to note that authorities said 110 of 134 security badges issued Ideal employees by the airport aviation department did not match the people who carried them. That suggests a security problem that goes well beyond Ideal, the legality of its employees and the legitimacy of the paperwork that led to their employment.

That people are wandering around in critical areas of the airport without IDs that match their faces and names certainly suggests airport security is a sieve, if not a laughingstock.

"If we are to ensure public safety, we must know who has access to the secure areas of the airports," said U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of the arrests. A view obvious to everybody but those responsible for security, apparently.

Certainly, security must start with verified, legal employees on whom background checks have been run. But it cannot end until every checkpoint at the airport is a place where entrance will be denied unless names, faces and cards match with certainty.

Until such basic security is addressed, any official at any level who suggests the nation is safe ought to be run from the room in disgrace.