ISIS Attackers in Europe used Fake IDs 

In ISIS's guide for undercover operatives to attack the West, it said, "Identity change is so important...This makes it extremely difficult for intelligence agencies to know who you really are...find people who can fake ID cards". That's because fake IDs allow terrorists not only to hide from governments, but to travel, open fraudulent bank accounts, obtain fraudulent credit cards, and board airplanes under fraudulent identities, like the 9/11 terrorists did.

To that effect, the ISIS terrorists who attacked Brussels and Paris in the last few months were supplied by a fake ID "factory" based in the Belgian capitol. The document mill was raided just weeks before the Brussels attack and yielded computers, scanners, printers, and 1,300 unfinished IDs, reportedly destined for criminals, human smugglers, and other terrorists. The authorities failed to make the connection between the fake IDs and the terrorists who were about to use them to blow up the Brussels airport.

Many of the factory's fake IDs were used in the planning and carrying out of both the Paris and Brussels attacks. Salah Abdeslam, the ringleader of the Paris attacks that took 130 innocent lives, provided jihadists disguised as Syrian refugees with fake Belgian ID cards as he transported them between Belgium and several European countries to coordinate logistics for the attacks. These fake IDs allowed the impostors to pass through at least two checkpoints in Austria and Germany undetected. Mohamed Belkaid, another major architect of the Paris attacks, and Najim Laachraoui, bomb maker for both the Paris and Brussels attacks, also reportedly used fake IDs from the factory. Khalid el-Bakraoui, the suicide bomber who attacked the Maelbeek station in Brussels, used a fake ID in the name of a professional Belgian soccer player. The investigations are still ongoing with co-conspirators still on the loose and it is uncertain how many other undercover ISIS terrorists may be using the high quality IDs, said to be able to fool authorities in France and Britain.

Belgian ID cards can be used to cross most borders in Europe without a passport. Similarly, we show our driver's licenses instead of passports to travel between the states here in the U.S. However, verifying our driver's licenses is more difficult, as each state creates, designs, and issues its own document with varying levels of counterfeit resistance and process security. Furthermore, there is no system in place at U.S. airports to digitally authenticate our driver's licenses.

America remains a top target for ISIS and the same type of operation could be secretly planned and executed by operatives here using counterfeit or fraudulently issued driver's licenses to cover their tracks. Hundreds of thousands of high quality counterfeit state driver's licenses and ID cards are being sold to anyone with $50, the internet, and an address. Many of these are coming in from China, hidden in toys and trinkets to evade customs inspection, and target states that issue IDs with weak security features. Worse, many states still have far too permissive practices at their DMVs and a valid, fraudulently-issued document is far more dangerous than a counterfeit. Islamic State has picked up where al-Qaeda left off by using fake identity documents as weapons. We can take those weapons away by increasing the security of our documents at issuance, implementing better security features into those documents, and shutting down the document mills. We need to act now because we won't get many more tragic warnings like the attacks in Europe. 

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