TailOverTeaKettle.com

In the work of corporate espionage, they say that the best way to steal information is to infiltrate the office building cleaning crew. Usually a company will provide all sorts of sophisticated techniques to safeguard their information, but then a crew comes into their office space, accessing all parts of the office, usually alone and off-hours, and has access to anything that’s around.

So when we think of our airports, we can see the visible protection measures… including confiscating liquids and making everyone run around with their shoes off, as measures to protect us.

And I’m sure that those measures provide some chance of warding off trouble. But here we are with airport workers in a drywall crew with access to secure areas… including the tarmac.

And just yesterday, the ICE nabbed 6 workers at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport who had security credentials that were obtained so that their crew could do work. One problem - the six happened to be illegal immigrants. Now there’s no indication that any of these people had any malicious intent. But it shows just how much screening is done on work crews before issuing permissions to access secure areas.

From the updated AP report:

Federal authorities say six illegal immigrants arrested at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport posed no specific security threat. But officials are concerned that the undocumented dry-wall workers from Mexico had badges giving them access to a secure area, including the tramac.

U-S Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesman Marc Raimondi says the men are all from Mexico and all employed by T.C. Drywall, based in Alpharetta. Raimondi says they were arrested as they arrived to work at the airport.

Officials say the men had been hired recently to install drywall inside the airport’s secure area. They will appear before an immigration judge and face deportation to Mexico.

Kenneth Smith, special agent in charge of the ICE office of investigations in Atlanta, says that while immigration officials don’t believe the men posed a specific threat, the concern is that undocumented immigrants had obtained badges to a secure area.

Smith said the agency is aggressively pursing illegal aliens at the places where they work. Smith says “areas of critical infrastructure, such as airports, are especially important to national security.'’

Since March 2003, immigration agents have conducted operations at 196 U-S airports and audited nearly six-thousand businesses. Raimondi says the effort has identified more than 58-hundred unauthorized airport workers and prompted the arrests of 11-hundred illegal workers.

This is not really an illegal immigration problem so much as a security issue. How easy would it be for someone who had malicious intents from getting onto a work crew like this? The answer seems to be… pretty easy.

The company, T.C. Drywall, seems to have pulled down their website. But a couple documents stiull exist (for now) like http://www.tcdrywallinc.com/TCDrywallInc.pdf. It seems that the company has had several contracts to do work at Hartsfield over the last three years. How many other workers have come in without being detected?

Doesn’t give a lot of confidence in the security process for airport workers!