COMPANIES WANT THE FBI TO SCREEN EMPLOYEES FOR SUSPECTED TERRORISTS

A wide range of industry groups, from trucking associations to
sporting-event organizers, are trying to gain access to the FBI's closely
guarded data on suspected terrorists and criminals in an effort to screen
their own employees.

The American Trucking Associations, for one, is lobbying Congress to give
it authority to go directly to the Federal Bureau of Investigation with
names and fingerprints of drivers, loading-dock workers and job applicants
of its member companies.

Operators of ports are hashing out with unions and legislators how to make
mandatory FBI checks of longshore workers, citing the risk of bombs. A bill
permitting such FBI checks has already passed the Senate.

The National Football League had the Super Bowl designated a "national
security special event" for the first time so it could run names of
concession workers and stadium employees through the lists for last
Sunday's game.

Fueling this push is the supposition that, next time around, terrorists may
attack something besides an airplane. But allowing companies to tap into
FBI intelligence banks opens a can of worms both for the government and
civil-liberties advocates. Unions protest that employers could use the
system to find old skeletons in people's closets and use them as a pretext
for dismissal.

"Why should a 40-year-old lose a job as a corporate executive because she
was caught smoking marijuana at age 17?" says Lewis Maltby, president of
the National Workrights Institute. "Employers have never been able to
distinguish between relevant criminal background information and irrelevant
information. Everything is a blackball."

Giving an industry access to the FBI lists typically requires an act of
Congress or a new federal regulation. Some industries, such as banking,
airlines and nuclear power plants, already have such access. Many other
businesses, from transport companies to providers of private security, are
arguing that they are no less deserving. "Motor carriers are a glaring
omission," says Duane Acklie, immediate past chairman of the trucker's
group and chairman of Crete Carrier Corp. in Lincoln, Neb.

Buttressing the cause of truckers and other groups is the fact that
industries with different kinds of security concerns, including banks and
day-care centers, have had the ability to check FBI records for years to
ferret out thieves and potential child abusers. Also, the recently enacted
Patriot Act will require state motor-vehicle departments to run criminal
checks before issuing licenses for hauling hazardous materials. Interest
groups are still debating how those names will be channeled to the FBI.

Of particular interest to this latest round of companies are the FBI's
watch lists of suspected terrorists, including people who may have
infiltrated the American workplace years ago as "sleeper" agents. One of
these lists, from the State Department, contains 64,000 names from around
the world. The FBI keeps its own list and won't say how many people are on
it. The U.S. Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service
and the Central Intelligence Agency also maintain lists that are supposed
to be shared with the FBI.

Though terrorists typically are trained to avoid detection, at least a few
of the Sept. 11 hijackers were on watchlists because their names had popped
up in connection with prior attacks: Mohamed Atta had been flagged by the
Customs Service, and Khalid al-Midhar was on a CIA list.

FBI background checks should turn up anybody with, among other things, an
arrest record, criminal conviction or protective order filed against them.
Not all of this information is readily accessible to those outside the
agency, and companies are concerned about missing such information in a
check on their own.

Indeed, the list of people checked out by the government has been growing.
In a little noticed trend, the FBI says it has been devoting more and more
of its resources to what it calls "civilian" background checks on behalf of
employers.

The bureau's Criminal Justice Information Services Division in Clarksburg,
W.V., runs an average of 42,500 sets of fingerprints a day through its
Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a database that
matches prints with criminal records. On average, 22,000 searches a day --
about 52% of the total -- are run at the request of employers or government
licensing agencies, says Michael Kirkpatrick, assistant director in charge
of the CJIS division.

Mr. Kirkpatrick says the FBI should be able to handle an influx of
additional searches from the private sector because it collects a fee for
doing them, though an FBI spokesman declines to comment on the prospect.
But Mr. Kirkpatrick adds that the FBI is going to have to make some
enhancements to make the process go smoothly, because the database used to
check fingerprints isn't linked to the terrorist database, part of a bigger
clearinghouse called the National Crime Information Center.

One of the first corporate systems to run FBI background checks was
developed by the banking industry in the early 1980s. That's when new
regulations barred banks from knowingly hiring anyone convicted of
"breaches of trust" or "acts of dishonesty." Today, banks funnel a new
employee or job applicant's prints, along with such identifying information
as name, height, weight and eye color, to a special office of the American
Bankers Association, the main banking trade group. There, the ABA uses a
direct computer link to the FBI to submit 350,000 prints a year. The FBI
turns up criminal records in 10% of cases, says the ABA's Diane Poole, who
runs the program.

Over the past several years, schools and day-care centers, among others,
have won access to the same databases to screen teachers and other
child-care workers; rules vary from state to state. Then, in 2000, Congress
mandated that airlines screen job applicants who seek work at certain large
airports, according to the American Association of Airport Executives.

After Sept. 11, Congress expanded airlines' and airports' screening
responsibilities. Now the airport association is administering fingerprint
and criminal checks for an estimated 750,000 workers nationwide with
unescorted access to secured areas such as tarmacs and gates. New laws bar
airlines or contractors from employing anyone who has been convicted in the
last 10 years of a host of offenses. The AFL-CIO says it is concerned the
checks are already being misused, citing the case of an airline worker who
was fired based on the discovery through an FBI check of violation of a
gun-use law from the 1980s.

But truckers and others who want FBI background checks say the pros
outweigh the cons. Tony Chrestman, president of the trucking unit of Ruan
Transportation Management Systems, says: "Previously, I would never have
thought about anyone taking one of our loads of propane and running it into
a building. There's got to be improvements to background checks."