Top ranking TSA managers are not telling the head office about nearly half of the security breaches at the country's major airports — including Newark — making it more difficult to spot dangerous weaknesses in the national fight against terrorism, according to a federal report obtained by The Star-Ledger.

But much of the fault may lie with the Transportation Security Administration headquarters itself, which has a poor system for reporting and monitoring breaches, says the report, which is scheduled to be released today by the Inspector General’s Office of the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the TSA.

"The agency does not provide the necessary guidance and oversight to insure that all breaches are consistently reported, tracked and corrected. As a result, it does not have a complete understanding of breaches occurring at the Nation’s airports and misses opportunities to strengthen aviation security." states the report, signed by Anne L. Richards, the Department of Homeland Security’s assistant inspector general.

The report grew out of a February 2011 request by U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) for an investigation into articles by The Star-Ledger about at least half a dozen security breaches at Newark Liberty International Airport in January and February of that year.

While the report focused on breaches occurring at Newark Liberty from January 2010 to May 2011, it says investigators also reviewed security breaches at five other major airports during the same 16-month period, to determine the severity of Newark’s problem as well as deficiencies at other airports and for TSA operations generally. The five other airports were not identified, though Lautenberg had requested investigators also look at John F. Kennedy International and LaGuardia airports.

While the actual number of breaches were blacked out, the redacted report said that only 42 percent of breaches detected in Newark during the survey period were then reported by local managers to the agency’s central Transportation Security Operations Center. The average reporting rate among all six airports surveyed was 53 percent, while the highest rate at any one of them was 88 percent.

The report said the TSA concurred with its findings, and agreed with recommendations to strengthen its guidelines for reporting and responding to breaches, and for mining nationwide data to improve security system-wide.

The security agency, "appreciates work to identify opportunities to further develop and improve TSA’s ability to mitigate security breaches at our Nation’s airports," TSA Administrator John Pistole wrote in his response to the findings, which was included in the report. "Directing, responding to and mitigating the risks associated with security breaches and incident comprise a critical aspect of TSA’s security model."

In Newark, the TSA had already replaced the manager in charge of security during most of the survey period. The report said security had improved there since then.

In April 2011, the agency installed Donald Drummer as Newark’s federal security director in place of Barbara Bonn Powell. Union representatives, supervisors and front line screeners say the move provided an immediate morale boost, though one that’s been dampened since Drummer has ordered suspensions and retraining for dozens of screeners found not to be doing their jobs.

Among the breaches cited by Lautenberg, a flight carrying a dead dog was allowed to continue to Los Angeles even after Powell had learned the carcass had not been properly screened. Less than two weeks later, a knife made it past a Newark security checkpoint in a carry-on bag, forcing officials to shut the airport for 45 minutes.

"A TSA source told The Star-Ledger newspaper there were three more security lapses, but TSA has disputed them," Lautenberg stated in letter dated Feb. 24, 2011, asking Inspector General Richard Skinner to look into the beaches.

Even before last year’s breaches in Newark, Lautenberg told Skinner, in January 2010 a Rutgers graduate student took advantage of a vacated security post at a checkpoint exit lane to enter a secure area and kiss his girlfriend, shutting the airport for six hours and disrupting air travel around the world.

The breaches were particularly alarming, Lautenberg said in the letter, because of Newark’s status as one of the nation’s busiest passenger hubs and as a so-called 9/11 airport, which also happens to be located in a densely populated area teaming with industrial, commercial and transportation facilities considered prime targets of terror. Newark Liberty handled 33.8 million passengers in 2011, 14th in the nation, and was where United Airlines Flight 93 took off on Sept. 11, 2001, before it was hijacked and crashed in Pennsylvania, killing all 44 people on board.

Investigators found local officials often may not report security problems because of confusion over what the national guidelines from TSA headquarters require.

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One of the six airports did not report that a passenger had been allowed into a secure area without a valid boarding pass because the local TSA management did not consider it reportable "based on their interpretation of the guidance."

One possible reason for the under-reporting, the report suggested, is that the definition of a breach varies in internal agency literature.

For example, the report quotes one TSA operations directive, titled "Management of Security Breaches," as defining a breach as, "any incident involving unauthorized and uncontrolled access by an individual or prohibited item into a sterile area or security area of an airport that is determined by TSA to present an immediate and significant risk to life, safety or the security of the transportation network."

But a different directive, involving the agency’s Performance and Results Information System, titled, "Reporting Security Incidents via PARIS," refers only to individuals’ gaining access improperly, not to prohibited items. The result, the report states, was differing interpretations of what constituted a breach among local TSA managers, resulting in inconsistent reporting, with only headquarters to blame.

"At the six airports visited, TSA did not always take action or document their actions to correct security breach vulnerabilities because," the report states, "the agency did not provide TSA management at the airports with a clear definition or guidance for identifying and reporting security breaches through its reporting systems."

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