Got A Fake ID? Welcome To America

(CBS)  Five years after 9/11, CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian finds that just about anyone with a computer and color printer can cross a U.S. border using a fake driver's license.

Hundreds of thousands of vehicles cross our northern and southern borders every day. Security agents are presented with thousands of forms of identification, and have to make difficult judgments about which are real — and which are not.

Five years after 9/11, CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian investigates just how safe and secure we are.

Inside a top-secret government lab, security experts comb through a treasure trove of personal IDs, searching for fakes.

"You always have to stay ahead of the bad guy," says Michael Everitt, the lab's chief investigator. He says consumer technology has made counterfeit IDs commonplace.

"If you obtain a computer, a scanner, a printer and maybe a laminator, and maybe a good piece of graphics software, you can start producing fraudulent documents," says Everitt.

No wonder then, that federal investigators, working undercover, made and used fake IDs to compromise the security at ports of entry on our northern and southern borders, sparking concern about our nation's vulnerability to another terrorist attack.

Three months ago, two government investigators showed just how easy it is to slip into this country, when, at a U.S. border crossing similar to the one between Detroit and Canada, they presented counterfeit driver's licenses and a fake birth certificate, but still were allowed entry into the U.S. Overall they played imposter 18 times. Not once were they detected.

"What that tells us is that anybody else who wants to get through our borders using fake or counterfeit documents is likely doing so as well," says Janice Kephart, a border security expert and former counsel to the 9/11 Commission.

"Our policy right now accepts driver's licenses as an acceptable form of identification. But we have absolutely no way for that border inspector to determine whether that's a real or fake document," Kephart adds.

One big reason, critics say, is that frontline inspectors still lack the training and technology — like hand-held scanners searching for digital water marks — to tell the difference between what's real and what's not.

This does not sit well with Sen. Charles Grassley, a powerful Republican who commissioned the investigation by the Government Accountability Office.

"We're finding there's been no improvement in the Department of Homeland Security's efforts — to train its personnel, to make sure that they have the proper tools to do the job to make sure that people can't come into this country," he says.

The 9/11 hijackers, for example, used fraudulent documents to obtain real driver's licenses and state IDs, which enabled them to purchase airline tickets and enroll in flight schools.

Legislation aimed at further securing our borders by requiring mandatory passports has been passed, but will not go into effect until at least 2008. Top border officials say they welcome such changes.