TSA Screening Barely Working Better Than Chance

rwise2112 writes "The General Accounting Office (GAO) has completed a study of the TSAs SPOT (Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques) program and found the program is only slightly better than chance at finding criminals. Given that the TSA has spent almost a billion dollars on the program, that's a pretty poor record. As a result, the GAO is requesting that both Congress and the president withhold funding from the program until the TSA can demonstrate its effectiveness."

Comments

Re:Fuck the TSA

[Charliemopps]

They even figured it out on 9/11. Remember there was a 4th plane.

Re:i wish you could read

[Bite The Pillow]

It looked at the meta-analyses to see if there was any support at all to behavioral detection. It looked at the TSA data to see if the TSA could defend its own assertions. The few positive points were basically nullified by poor data collection.

Half of the GAO summary was devoted to the part of the story you ignored, which was the relevant part. It's like you can read, but chose not to for the middle half. The story you will love is that the TSA is inept at capturing relevant data. The GAO is capable of seeing through that.

Don't bother straining yourself, I'll even paste the words here so you can ignore them more easily.

Further, the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) April 2011 study conducted to validate SPOT's behavioral indicators did not demonstrate their effectiveness because of study limitations, including the use of unreliable data. Twenty-one of the 25 behavior detection officers (BDO) GAO interviewed at four airports said that some behavioral indicators are subjective. TSA officials agree, and said they are working to better define them. GAO analyzed data from fiscal years 2011 and 2012 on the rates at which BDOs referred passengers for additional screening based on behavioral indicators and found that BDOs' referral rates varied significantly across airports, raising questions about the use of behavioral indicators by BDOs. To help ensure consistency, TSA officials said they deployed teams nationally to verify compliance with SPOT procedures in August 2013. However, these teams are not designed to help ensure BDOs consistently interpret SPOT indicators.

TSA has limited information to evaluate SPOT's effectiveness, but plans to collect additional performance data. The April 2011 study found that SPOT was more likely to correctly identify outcomes representing a high-risk passenger--such as possession of a fraudulent document--than through a random selection process. However, the study results are inconclusive because of limitations in the design and data collection and cannot be used to demonstrate the effectiveness of SPOT. For example, TSA collected the study data unevenly. In December 2009, TSA began collecting data from 24 airports, added 1 airport after 3 months, and an additional 18 airports more than 7 months later when it determined that the airports were not collecting enough data to reach the study's required sample size. Since aviation activity and passenger demographics are not constant throughout the year, this uneven data collection may have conflated the effect of random versus SPOT selection methods.

Re:Fuck the TSA

[swillden]

I'm fine with armed pilots. They should be given frangible bullets suitable for use on aircraft./p

Frangible bullets suck. Pilots should be armed with jacketed hollow points, the same thing air marshals and every other sort of law enforcement carries.

Frangible bullets are lousy manstoppers. They tend to make wounds that are wide and shallow. Very ugly, but without enough penetration to reach major blood vessels they have no real effect on an attacker who doesn't decide to helpfully fall down and lie still. And yet they still penetrate walls and such much more than we'd like -- and would have absolutely no trouble blowing through the thin aluminum skin of an airplane.

The bottom line with bullets is that if they have enough penetration to be useful at stopping a person, they're going to be able to pass through a few walls.

But, really, it's not a problem. Airplanes aren't airtight to begin with. They leak air all the time when "pressurized", but continue pumping more in to maintain the desired pressure. Punch a few half-inch holes in the skin and the pumps will just compensate by increasing the flow a bit.

The pilots should be armed with standard defensive handguns and ammunition as a last resort in case the hijackers manage to get through the locked door before the passengers beat them to death. It's unlikely they'll need their guns, but it's better to have them and not need them.