Three weeks ago, Stefan Gonda, a 49-year old electrician, flew back to Ireland from Slovakia, where he spent his Christmas vacation. A short time after his arrival, he was arrested by the Irish national police and charged with carrying explosives in his backpack. But Gonda never put any explosives there.
According to the news report, a policeman in Slovakia secretly put three ounces of plastic explosives in Gonda’s backpack, without Gonda knowing it, before the traveled boarded a plane in de Bratislava.
It seems, according to the same reports, it was a training exercise for a dog to detect explosives. But the officer in charge of the exercise, the story says, “got distracted” and “forgot” to retrieve the explosives.
To complicate matters, Slovak authorities contacted by fax (written in what is described as “broken English”) the company in charge of handling luggage, asking that company to find the missing explosives.
The luggage-handling company, not knowing exactly what to do, contacted the Irish authorities, who, not having all the information, mobilized the national police and the Irish army's bomb squad, causing the closing for several hours of a major street in Dublin and the evacuation of several buildings.
Finally, the Embassy of Slovakia spoke with Irish authorities and provided the explanation about the incident. Gonda was set free and he will face no charges.
However, it seems this kind of incidents happens more frequently than we think. According to the same news report, France stopped secretly putting explosives inside the luggage of passengers after losing more than 100 ounces of explosives that were never recovered.
In Gonda’s case, the story had a happy ending. Slovakia's deputy prime minister, Robert Kalinak, said the incident was caused by “a silly and unprofessional mistake.”
I wonder then how many other stories also involving perfectly innocent people from Slovakia, Ireland, or anywhere in the world did not have a happy ending due precisely to silly and unprofessional mistakes.
It is alarming and cause of great concern to thing that due to errors and lack of professionalism (that are unavoidable, because we are all human) innocent people will be treated as criminals or suspects of terrorism. At the same time, those same errors, but in the opposite direction, may allow potential terrorists to board planes, even if those names are duly included in the appropriate federal database.
Let’s take, for example, another database, E-Verify, maintained by the federal government and used by thousands of companies all over the country to verify the legal status of potential employees. According to different reports, from 3 to 42 percent of the information included in E-Verify is wrong. And those affected by those mistakes can do little to correct them.
If it is difficult to verify our own workers, how then we will be able to identify with certainty our enemies? And we need to do it right the first time, because in this confrontation there is no room for unprofessional mistakes, be it at training exercises or with databases.