Running head: IMPACT OF 9/11 ON PRIVATE SECURITY 1
Impact of 9/11 on Private Security
Jan Penny
Eastern Kentucky University
Issues in Security Management
SSE 827
Frank Kubala, PhD.
March 24, 2018
IMPACT OF 9/11 ON PRIVATE SECURITY 2
Impact of 9/11 on Private Security
The Real ID Act
The events of 9/11 forever changed how the United States (US) of America thinks about
security and has led to Congress working to develop a security framework to better protect the
country. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created in March 2003, bringing
together 22 separate agencies and offices into a single cabinet-level department in order to better
secure and protect the nation (Krueger, 2010, p. 10). The DHS’ vision ensures a homeland that is
safe, secure, and resilient against terrorism and other hazards. Among the many missions the
DHS took on was the responsibility for the prevention of terrorism and enhancing security and
securing and managing borders.
On August 1, 2001, Hani Hanjour and Khalid Almihdhar approached a group of day
laborers in Falls Church, VA looking for help. Luis Martinez-Flores agreed to help them for
$100 cash in exchange for accompanying them to a nearby Virginia Department of Motor
Vehicles (DMV) office and vouching they were residents of the state (Levy, 2002, p. 44). The
three men filled out the Virginia DL51 applications and Flores swore that they all lived at the
same local address. This satisfied the requirements of a Virginia regulation introduced to help
immigrants get a nondriver’s identification card without going through the normal procedure
requiring concrete proof of residency. A DMV worker issued Hanjour and Almihdhar official
Virginia State identification cards on the spot and one month later they showed those
identification cards to airport personnel before boarding American Airlines Flight 77 which they
then hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon (Levy, 2002). Seven of the 19 hijackers used
Virginia’s “we’ll take your word for it” approach to obtain identification cards and other
hijackers were able to obtain driver’s licenses fraudulently from other states (Levy, 2002).
IMPACT OF 9/11 ON PRIVATE SECURITY 3
Before 9/11 the thought of a high-tech national identification system would have been
unacceptable. After 9/11 the country’s political leaders focused on steps to protect Americans
some decisions were controversial and thought to infringe on individual rights but in many cases
balancing security and individual rights involved tough decisions (Smith, 2001). The security
measures considered; national identification cards, surveillance, wiretapping, internet
surveillance, and holding suspects indefinitely without charges, quickly raised serious challenges
to individual rights, civil liberties and privacy.
One of the most visible security effort was the call for a national identification card,
universally recognizable and containing biometric identifiers such as a finger print or retinal scan
(Levy, 2002). Numerous proposals were looked at to secure drivers’ licenses and identification
cards and two Virginia Representatives quickly introduced the Driver’s License Modernization
