TSA Hires Known Rapists

TSA takes 23 months to answer FOIA request

By Chris Paschenko
The Daily News
Published August 28, 2011
Nearly two years ago, The Daily News filed an open records request with the Transportation Security Administration, intending to shed light on how a “high risk” sex offender could pass a federal background check to work at the Port of Galveston.

It took 23 months for the administration, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to answer the newspaper’s request under the Freedom of Information Act. Neither the administration nor Texas’ congressional representatives responded to questions on whether the time lapse was acceptable.

Although the Privacy Act prevented the administration from commenting on an individual, it provided just 17 words and numbers printed on one sheet of paper, detailing how it granted 905 waiver cases in Texas since the 2002 inception of the Transportation Worker Identification Credential.

Among those waivers, the administration granted 511 for criminal convictions and 394 involved immigration eligibility, according to the administration’s answer under the Freedom of Information Act request.

Congress required the credential through the Maritime Transportation Security Act.

The credential, which contains a worker’s fingerprint, allows unescorted access to secure areas of facilities and vessels at the nation’s ports. Controlling access to secure areas is critical to enhancing port security, the administration states on its website.

TWIC Requirements

Those convicted of certain crimes, like espionage, treason and terrorism, are forever prohibited from obtaining the credential.

Applicants convicted of murder, regardless of when it occurred, could apply for a waiver. The administration also could grant waivers to applicants convicted within the last seven years of extortion, fraud, bribery, smuggling, immigration violations, drugs, kidnapping, robbery and rape or aggravated sexual abuse.

Citing the Privacy Act, the administration said it could not provide information on how Mark J. Semkiw, 49, qualified for a credential. Semkiw entered the Galveston Police Department’s radar in September 2009 when he was accused of peeping in an isle woman’s window.

Semkiw was sentenced in 1987 for breaking into a woman’s home in Dearborn, Mich., and sexually assaulting her, public records reveal. Advances in DNA technology also led to a plea agreement on a 1980s rape charge, police said. He also served 43 months on a first-degree criminal sexual contact charge, Michigan prison records show.

During a parole, Dearborn police in plain clothes tailed Semkiw at night through a neighborhood, watching him unscrew motion-sensor lights, police said. Police detained him outside a house where a single woman lived. He had retrieved gloves and a mask, police told The Daily News for a story on Sept. 25, 2009, the same day the newspaper filed its open records request.

Sterling Payne, a spokeswoman for the administration’s Office of Strategic Communication and Public Affairs, had no immediate comment on why it took 23 months to answer the newspaper’s response.