The TSA: Looking for terror in all the wrong places

Printed from: https://newbostonpost.com/2016/05/09/the-tsa-looking-for-terror-in-all-the-wrong-places/

(Courtesy of Wikipedia) (Courtesy of Wikipedia)

There’s widespread agreement on both sides of the aisle that the Transportation Security Administration needs to change. But just what that change should look like is a question that no one wants to address.

Recently, and with some blowback from Congress, the agency proposed that it should discontinue security screening at certain unnamed small airports where it has determined that the chances of a terrorist attack are extremely low, presumably based on the number of passengers and types of aircraft serviced.

A TSA spokesman acknowledged that he could “understand the concern” with having flights go unchecked for items like guns and bombs, but cited the expense of having federal employees at locations that don’t have a steady schedule of departures. To allay concerns, these unscreened flights would be “reverse screened” upon landing, a procedure intended to ensure that no prohibited items enter the sterile area of the destination airport.

Instead of an effort to deploy resources based on risk, the plan is actually an attempt to become leaner in order to placate almost universal criticism over its size and performance. But the proposal flew like a lead balloon among certain members of Congress and is likely to go nowhere. It’s just the latest in a string of desperate ideas put forth by an agency beleaguered by a can’t-win situation straight out of a graduate school case study.

As a former special agent with the Federal Aviation Administration, I saw just how bad the pre-9/11 private screening companies performed, and how little federal regulations did to better it. Back then, when private screeners did poorly on government security testing, the regulators would simply design easier tests (which they still failed). And hardly anyone concentrated on the people boarding flights, focusing strictly on guns and large knives. It was federal oversight at its worse, causing the former inspector general to label the FAA a “tombstone agency.”

After the attacks of 9/11 made this substandard security impossible to ignore, TSA was quickly created, seemingly with the best of intentions. Congressmen who now ridicule the agency demanded its formation, arguing that only a federal workforce could protect the traveling public. And though there have been no successful attacks on U.S. civil aviation in the fourteen years since 9/11, Congress has turned the TSA into a perfect target for criticism when, in fact, much of the fault for the agency’s failings lies with them.

Congress wants the agency to be smaller and more effective while focusing on the wrong threats; namely, finding bad items instead of bad people. Behavioral profiling was a step in the right direction, introducing a layer of security meant to identify high-risk passengers. But you won’t find many champions of such an approach in Washington, because targeting people is fraught with political peril (even though it’s the same approach used domestically for gun control). All the while, government oversight bodies continue to conduct tests that show that the TSA is not so great at detecting prohibited items, and every new initiative is met by a large constituency ready to call it wrong-headed.

Add this to a traveling public who wants intensive screening for all of the other passengers, just not themselves, and you have a true can’t-win situation.

Meanwhile, security pundits constantly complain that the TSA has never stopped a terrorist attack — a silly criticism presupposing that the deterrence created by a security team which is better-trained and equipped has no impact on terrorist planning. It also assumes that not one of the many millions of objects surrendered at security checkpoints was carried with malicious intent. Finally, the implementation of electronic screening of all checked baggage for explosives by the TSA — an enormous achievement — is an enormous improvement in aviation security which has likely prevented the introduction of explosives into checked baggage as with Pan Am 103.

TSA will continue to be the whipping-boy of the federal government so long as it is answerable to dozens of Congressional committees and subcommittees rife with politicians who see the agency as a way to get noticed by the media rather than a way to best secure the flying public. And it will never be deemed a success, so long as it is asked to perform a senseless mission: focusing on bad objects instead of bad people.

Anthony Amore is an expert in security matters and is formerly an Assistant Federal Security Director with the Transportation Security Administration in Boston.

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