Much Ado About Ahmadinejad. But What of the Other 3,100 Iranians in the US?

Unless you’ve been living in a cave (a real cave, not the wired data center that Bin Laden apparently occupies), you’ve probably seen all the hoopla surrounding Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visit to the U.N. and his lecture at Columbia University. Instead of one Iranian who’s hard to miss, perhaps we should be more concerned about the 3,100 Iranians who’ve legally entered the U.S. in the last six years under the Diversity Visa Program (DV).

The DV was created in 1990 and according to a new GAO report,

“The DV program is contributing to the diversity of U.S. immigrants; more than 500,000 aliens from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States have become legal permanent residents through the program.”

That all sounds nice. But here’s where it gets scary. Again, from the GAO site, they’ve found that the DV is

“vulnerable to fraud committed by and against DV applicants, but State has not compiled comprehensive data on detected and suspected fraudulent activity. [...] Consular officers at 6 of the 11 posts we reviewed reported that widespread use of fake documents, such as birth certificates, marriage certificates, and passports, presented challenges when verifying the identities of applicants and dependents. Difficulty in verifying identities has security implications because State’s security checks rely heavily on name-based databases. [Emphasis added.] In 2003, State’s Inspector General raised concerns that aliens from countries designated as state sponsors of terrorism can apply for diversity visas. Nearly 9,800 persons from these countries have obtained permanent residency in the United States through the program.”

The Associated Press reports that,

“Of countries designated by the State Department as sponsors of terrorism, over 2,700 people from Cuba have come into the United States through the program, as have 3,100 Iranians, 3,700 Sudanese and 160 Syrians.”

The State Department’s “difficulty verifying identities” due to its heavy reliance on name-based databases is a solvable problem.

If ever there was a case for identity resolution, this would be it. Identity resolution engines are typically used to uncover risk, fraud, conflicts of interest and master data management (MDM). Identity resolution is an operational intelligence process whereby organizations can search disparate data sources with a view to understanding possible identity matches and non-obvious relationships across those sources. It analyzes all of the information relating to individuals from multiple sources of data, and then applies likelihood and probability scoring to determine which identities are a match and what, if any, linkage exists between those identities.

It’s safe to assume that the State Department’s data is spread across different systems, platforms and even countries. But that’s not a problem for an identity resolution solution that glides across multiple data sources and applies sophisticated similarity search techniques to resolve multiple identities.

The State Department’s issues with name resolution is also complicated by the transliteration of foreign names, misspellings, typos and out right identity fraud, but again this is solvable with identity resolution. (See Playing the Name Game with Terrorist Watch Lists and Shoplifter Databases, for more information.)

Here’s hoping that the State Department gets its databases in synch quickly so we can avoid this nightmare scenario as reported by Reuters:

“The [GAO] report quoted a U.S. security officer in Turkey as saying it would be possible for Iranian intelligence officers to pose as applicants and not be detected if their identities were not already known to U.S. intelligence.”