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Former TSA Administrator Speaks
phantomfive writes "Former TSA head Kip Hawley talks about how the agency is broken and how it can be fixed:
'The crux of the problem, as I learned in my years at the helm, is our wrongheaded approach to risk. In attempting to eliminate all risk from flying, we have made air travel an unending nightmare for U.S. passengers and visitors from overseas, while at the same time creating a security system that is brittle where it needs to be supple. ... the TSA's mission is to prevent a catastrophic attack on the transportation system, not to ensure that every single passenger can avoid harm while traveling. Much of the friction in the system today results from rules that are direct responses to how we were attacked on 9/11. But it's simply no longer the case that killing a few people on board a plane could lead to a hijacking. ...The public wants the airport experience to be predictable, hassle-free and airtight and for it to keep us 100% safe. But 100% safety is unattainable. Embracing a bit of risk could reduce the hassle of today's airport experience while making us safer at the same time."
Let the experience of other countries (where terrorist attacks are unfortunately common) be a lesson here: big crowds are targets. The TSA's security checkpoints at airports, especially busy airports, create big crowds, and those crowds are not behind any sort of security. A terrorist who wanted to kill a big crowd of Americans could walk in to a major airport just before a holiday and kill hundreds of people without ever dealing with security.
The fact that it has not happened yet is an indication that airport security measures are not what is keeping terrorist at bay.
Palm trees and 8
Gee, this is new, how many times have we seen officials make statements about this regarding any of the current 'War on ______' policies? Hey, how about you fix the damn thing before you had 'Former' amended onto your title.
Please get rid of it.
Not only is it expensive, it is total theater.
It's useless and doesn't help anybody or anything but TSA agents and the companies selling cancerous porno x-ray machines.
The thing is the TSA should NOT be the ones preventing a "catastrophic attack on the transportation system". That should be the CIA, even the military!!
The TSA should, at best, be simply a light wall to keep things reasonable as far as who goes on a plane. That is it. Thus if you think about it, the TSA really has NO proper role. Not at the level they are at anyway - security would be better managed by airport managed security.
But you say, what about the centralized no-fly list? Well what about it? Who cares who flies? That list has done WAY more harm to innocent people than it has ever helped. Even if we let someone who truly is a terrorist on, it doesn't matter. Either they fly somewhere, or the try to hijack the plane and get mauled by passengers, or possibly they get something by regional security and blow up a plane. Oh well; we lived under that system just fine for decades.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This is a reference:
In September 2006, in response to the new policies limiting the amounts of liquids and gels that passengers could carry on airplanes, Milwaukee resident Ryan Bird wrote "Kip Hawley is an Idiot" on a plastic bag given to passengers by airport security for those substances. As a result he claims he was detained and told that the First Amendment did not apply to security checkpoints.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Weapons have never been necessary to take control of an airliner. They just make it a little easier.
I really do not see any chance of the suggestions in this article happening. All it would take is one suicidal terrorist whose goal is simply to bring down a plane and kill all its passengers to scuttle it. I do not think the American public will view this is "acceptable", especially if it turns out that what brought down the plane in my mythical scenario was something that the current screening methods would likely have caught.
I really do not know what to think of the article's suggestions on liquids. I've read where various chemistry experts essentially say that terrorists cannot construct liquid bombs that will work at all without having to basically use chemistry equipment, ice baths, lengthy mixing sessions that no one could possibly ignore, etc. Yet here the former TSA head insists that there is a very real risk here. Who is right? Does the former TSA head know something that chemistry experts have somehow missed? Or is the former TSA head working on crap information? I sure don't know but that's one question I'd like resolved.
My experience has been that the people who bitch the most about screening are those who travel the least. I'm not saying that there aren't regular travelers who don't complain. Not at all. But in my circle of acquaintances, the people I know who just completely and utterly cannot talk about this subject without getting completely bent out of shape about it simply do not travel by plane. One of them hasn't been on a plane in more than 5 years. He's likely to travel by plane less than 5 more times in his lifetime. The other guy I know actually gets the most worked up about this. He hasn't been on a plane since before 9/11 and he is extremely unlikely to ever travel by plane again in his life, yet this whole subject of TSA screenings is some kind of hot button issue to him.
is to accept the fact that terrorism is extremely effective even if it fails. it builds police states and makes everyday things like travel difficult at the expense of the target nation. it forces them to divert energy and resources into possibilities and not actualities.
a better solution is to stop this "war on terror" crap and pay closer attention to what it is exactly we do that leaves a group of people so determined with nothing left to lose that they will kill thousands of your innocent civillians.
should you consider Osama Bin Laden the cause of the terrorist attacks against america, here are his demands: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/nov/24/theobserver
now, while some of them are outlandish so are some promises from a politician seeking to gain or maintain an elected office. and so to have our demands on the middle eastern region been for the past 30 years. regime change, cia government overthrow, perpetually cheap oil, proxy wars, military bases at the expense of the indigenous citizens, propping up dictatorial regimes and the list goes on. But Bin Laden asked for some rather reasonable things as well that we could have done.
1. stop treating israel like some sort of king among theives. if their only justification for their city is rooted in religious text, thats fine for them. They should not have the right to force that opinion on other nations however and by virtue of their creation should at least attempt to get along with them instead of bombing the hell out of them semi-annually. the bombs, helicopters, and american artillery are what hes complaining about. our complicit enforcement of the palestinian 'warsaw ghetto' could probably be eliminated and save the tax payers a few billion dollars a year.
another quote, "You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of you international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world." Well, yeah. The carter doctrine sort of mandates we do that. our free market policy at the hands of the plutocracy has become more reliant on war as a revenue source and as a big stick lately, and we could probably reign that in.
he complains about our sanctions against iraq, how we support countries like egypt and syria despite the fact they routinely murder their own people. the most contentious place in the middle east for alot of muslims is jerusalem, and we stuck a goddamn embassy there.
im not saying the guys a doctoral scholar here; the rest of his argument is based largely on the same religious crap our evangelicals push. Im just saying we could have done maybe 25 things in the middle east differently after the 9/11 attacks that would have negated the strip searches, pat downs, border searches, and other security theater that are killing the "land of the free."
Good people go to bed earlier.
it's simply no longer the case that killing a few people on board a plane could lead to a hijacking. Never again will a terrorist be able to breach the cockpit simply with a box cutter or a knife. The cockpit doors have been reinforced, and passengers, flight crews and air marshals would intervene.
I wanted to reduce the amount of time that officers spent searching for low-risk objects, but politics intervened at every turn. Lighters were untouchable, having been banned by an act of Congress. And despite the radically reduced risk that knives and box cutters presented in the post-9/11 world, allowing them back on board was considered too emotionally charged for the American public. We did succeed in getting some items (small scissors, ice skates) off the list of prohibited items.
He has a list of five things he suggests to improve the TSA:
1. No more banned items
2. Allow all liquids
3. Give TSA officers more flexibility and rewards for initiative, and hold them accountable
4. Eliminate baggage fees
5. Randomize security
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
As far as I remember, a proposal to install lockable, steel-reinforced cockpit doors in airliners was floating around well before September 11th ever happened. Because airlines didn't want to pay for these doors (they would have to be custom manufactured), and didn't want the extra weight of these doors added to their planes (profits, profits, profits), there was literally nothing preventing the 9/11 hijackers from taking over 4 different airliners on that day. Instead of making air-travel hell for everybody, why not make airliners themselves more secure, by simple measures like installing lockable, reinforced cockpit doors?
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
I said it back in '01 and I'll repeat it now. By giving up our freedom in the name of security, we have allowed the terrorists to prevail. Pursue them. Hunt them down. Deal with those who have harbored them as enemies of the US. But we should never have relinquished a single liberty for the sake of security.
Benjamin Franklin said it best:
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Franklin's Contributions to the Conference on February 17 (III) Fri, Feb 17, 1775
"Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
I say the deserve another billion/yr because, afterall, look at all the terrorism they've stopped just this week!
Finding a legally registered, unloaded, gun belonging to a law abiding (if forgetful) citizen does not count as stopping terrorism. Not to mention that all of these objects are things that would easily be caught by standard X-rays. The TSA has NEVER stopped a terrorist. Not one. In the years since 9-11 any terrorist activity was either stopped well before they got to the airport, or they actually got on the plane and the attempt failed. But I guess the TSA needs to brag about something to justify their existence, so they point out all the absent minded people they've detained for forgetting about something dangerous in their bag.
Terrorism is stopped by law enforcement work outside of the airport. If a terrorist plot made it that far without being discovered, you've already failed and you need to move farther up the chain to figure out what went wrong and how it could have been foiled sooner. In terms of value for our dollars, the TSA is a huge waste.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Also, we can learn from other countries that being attacked by terrorists does not mean you have to institute a police state, or go off and start a couple of unnecessary wars. We've spend many times the actual cost of the 9/11 attacks trying to protect ourselves from anything like it happening again. But as TFA implies, nobody's asking if the cost exceeds the benefit. And now we have a monstrous national security apparatus and a military-industrial complex more entrenched and extensive than ever before.
The U.K. had terrorist attacks for years, including the fairly horrendous one in London in 2005. But they haven't gone crazy about it, or at least not as crazy as the U.S. has.
This year, the TSA is requesting 8.2 Billion dollars. In the past five (5) years, the TSA has made some 1,035 arrests. Approximately 30% of those were related to clear immigration violations and had nothing to do with security. If we use today's annual budget number, multiply it by five and divide it into the remainder of the arrests, we get a figure of approximately $53,000,000. This is extremely rough math. Give or take $5,000,000 either way, we are looking at a price of around $50,000,000 per arrest. I don't know about you, but I thank that's extremely expensive. Swirl in the unbelievable cost in TIME for each passensger to screened and you have a serious net drain on the economy. The question becomes not can we have 100% security but, as Mr. Hawley states, what will be the ACCEPTABLE level of security that will be a reasonable balance between risk and cost?
*** Don't be dull.***
US constitution, and how it was born is a wonderful story you may wish to read sometime. I'm not even american, and I found it fascinating.
"How it was born" is also quite relevant to your question.
Just today we hear of another TSA screener busted, this time for stealing iPads. How hard would it be to find one who would happily pass anything at all through his checkpoint if the price was right?
Add Hawley to the list of people for whom wisdom (or the audacity to voice it) came too late in their careers to make any difference.
Tenemus pyrobolos atqui jacimus cognitiones.
Nothing 'proto' about it. My wife simply doesnt understand why i wont subject myself to it.
Good-bye
The crux of the problem, as I learned in my years at the helm, is our wrongheaded approach
Considering the TSA is not even a decade old and is fraught with issues from top to bottom -- we'd do well to pay attention to these indicators and end the TSA. It is a failure that has served no useful purpose other than act as Security Theatre and subject law abiding Americans to indignities. Once a Company or Organization develops a mindset or culture, it is near impossible to change that. It's too late to change the TSA, and it's most likely that the TSA does not want to change.
I think he deserves some kudos for this. After arguing against Schneier a few weeks ago on The Economoist about how things were peachy, it takes a lot of guts to come out and say "I was wrong, TSA policies suck, and its partly my fault and due to my leadership".
Calling him an idiot doesnt really help, whereas his admission and piece hopefully WILL. Or would you have preferred more bullheadedness and denial from Kip?
I think this tidbit was the most important part. It's the first official confirmation that a lot of what happens in the inspection lanes is pure theatre as many had claimed before:
And despite the radically reduced risk that knives and box cutters presented in the post-9/11 world, allowing them back on board was considered too emotionally charged for the American public.
The US tourism is starting to complain, lobbyists are closing their wallets and, someone needs to fall on their sword so that the TSA can change it's direction, from tourist hostile to tourist friendly.
Catch is an the agency has allowed a culture of ego driven superiority where any hint of resistance from uppity foreigners is brutally and sadistically punished. Each and every abuse is published and millions of potential tourist read about and a percentage alter their holiday plans well away from the US, the more frequent the events the greater the percentage.
By the time the agency is rebuilt and it will take years and many dismissals to rebuild it, US tourism industry will be crippled for many years to come. Bush to Obama and years of more of the same, has just set the rot in place.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
because after 9/11 we found out that many of the airports relied on contractors that were borderline. Little to no training. Enormous turnover. Effectively no ability to arrest or detain people. Subject to pressure from the airlines, etc. So someone had, what was probably a good idea, hire people as full time, highly trained screeners that could server or coordinate with law enforcement
It was never a good idea. It was a reaction.
If they had thought through it at all, they would have just left things as they were.
If you think about it we are NO BETTER OFF TODAY then we were under the old system. People can still easily sneak on board the exact weapons used in the original attack if they really want to.
What has changed that actually demonstrably improved security is two things:
1) Lock cockpit door and prevent someone from taking control of the plane.
2) Passengers taking out potential threats before they become huge problems.
The second happened in real time, even as the original attacks were unfolding. The passengers on the Pennsylvania flight took out that flight rather than letting it hurt more people. Ever since then a number of attacks have bee thwarted by passengers.
The TSA just happens to ALSO exist at the same time as those two improvements are made, and yet they seem to get credit for something that has nothing to do with them.
Disband the TSA, and go back to the old way. The security was not perfect but it was humane. Passengers can take care of the rest thanks.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm not going to argue we didn't get what we needed. What we got was a mutant hybrid that may not be producing no better an outcome than the old system. A lot of people recognized the old system was a large, potential security hole.
Yes, but the thing is that since the new system is also a large potential security hole, we don't NEED anything better. No attack has succeeded from that day exactly because of the two factors I mentioned; you cannot gain control of the plane in a swift attack, and passengers will stop you from trying pretty much anything else.
So since we do not NEED anything better, lets go back to where passengers were not treated like animals (which is really a poor metaphor since PETA would long ago have put a stop to any process that treated animals as badly as airline travelers are treated) to the degree they are now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley