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US Airport Screeners Missed 95% of Weapons, Explosives In Undercover Tests
An anonymous reader writes: An internal investigation by the TSA found that 95% of agents testing airport checkpoints were able to bring weapons through. In one case, an alarm sounded, but during the pat down, the screener failed to detect a fake plastic explosive taped to the undercover agent's back. ABC reports: "Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson was apparently so frustrated by the findings he sought a detailed briefing on them last week at TSA headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, according to sources. U.S. officials insisted changes have already been made at airports to address vulnerabilities identified by the latest tests. 'Upon learning the initial findings of the Office of Inspector General's report, Secretary Johnson immediately directed TSA to implement a series of actions, several of which are now in place, to address the issues raised in the report,' the DHS said in a written statement to ABC News."
My point is that the methods (and level of "fake enemy") on those "friendly" security checks are very different from what most people (most "bad guys" included) will ever use.
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
Not to mention keeping our airplanes safe from containers of liquid larger than 3.4 ounces. Who knows what a terrorist might do if he smuggled 4 ounces of shampoo aboard a plane!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Or will revelations like this lead terrorists to try more often? If there terrorists think that there's a good chance they will be caught, they will spend more time making their plans, and only do something that's truly devastating (like 9-11). However, if it really is so easy to get weapons past security, it makes more sense to spend almost no time at all planning anything, and just do a lot of attempts since it seems like things are quite likely to succeed.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
You stop terrorists by first knowing who is getting on the planes in the first place. This is how Israel secures its airports. They know who you are before you even show up at the airport. They have multiple layers of people that are trained to spot suspicious behavior and act upon it.
The second thing you do is give the plane an ability to defend itself when it is attacked. Let us just assume the terrorists get on the plane with whatever. What is the plane going to do to defend itself. I refer to the passengers, the flight attendants, the pilots, etc. What can they do to shut it down when it happens?
The funniest thing that has come out of 9/11 is that the government was actually totally useless and that people... just people are far more useful. Because what is actually stopping terrorist attacks is that you cannot take over a plane like they did on 9/11 anymore. What allowed that to happen was that passengers didn't know what the terrorists were going to do. They thought the plane was going to Cuba or something. They didn't know they were going to be murdered en mass to murder thousands of other people. If you tried to do 9/11 today... the passengers would rip the terrorists apart. No government agency required.
The TSA is at most stopping Richard Reed type attacks where someone just wants to blow the plane up. But you can't fly those planes into anything anymore because the passengers will just kill you.
Here is my solution:
1. Require a special ID to use commercial airplanes. The ID would require that you are on a list and they know who you are... transport on the system is not a right. If you're a suspicious person then the system might just say "take a bus". By all means open the system up to due process so if you think you're on a ban list then you can fight that in court. The system might also flag certain people out for more security when they show up at the security gate. So you'd still get to be on the plane but you personally would be going through extra security because the system doesn't trust you.
2. Give flight attendants and pilots some defense training. That includes possibly giving them weapons. I have no problem for example with the pilot having a gun. If he can fly the plane into a mountain then he can be have a machine gun for all I care. He's fully capable of killing everyone on the plane as well as whomever is on the ground when the plane strikes. So give him a gun. If you want it to be one of those subsonic jobs that don't penetrate very far, that is fine. But lets not pretend the pilot can't kill everyone. He can.
3. Upgrade the computer security on those planes. You shouldn't be able to control the auto pilot through the entertainment network accessed by wifi. That was fucking pathetic.
4. The actual gate security can probably go back to what it was before 9/11 with the addition of checking special IDs and subjecting people to additional security if they're on a list. The vast majority of people would have much less to worry about.
Things that would cause someone to get flagged... non-citizens might be inherently less trustworthy. Various age brackets and genders... if you're an old woman then you're just less likely to be a problem. That sort of thing. Of course this should link to the FBI and the NSA and the CIA so that if any of those groups had an issue with someone, then they could independently flag someone for the TSA.
My objective here is to keep as many people safe as possible while maintaining the effiency of the transport network. Some people might say "this will lead to profiling and profiling is wrong"... profiling is a basic aspect of criminal investigation and intelligence work. Ever see Silence of the Lambs? It was about an FBI serial killer PROFILER. Profiling is fine so long as it isn't stupid. Profiling on the basis of race for example is stupid especially when that is the only variable. It can BE a variable so long as there is a reason for it. I'm not sure what reason you could use to justify it... but I'm open
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
They already knew that TSA screenings are security theater. It takes only a bit of casual observation, from the waiting lounge, to see which security personnel at which airport are competent or most overwhelmed. The 9/11 terrorists and any modern counterparts have opportunities to visit or travel through airports with _real_ security, like Egypt, Arabia, Pakistan, and Israel, and see the trade-offs between cost and security at all of them. There were compelling reasons that the 9/11 attackers chose Boston to fly from: one of the reasons was doubtless the very lax security at Logan Airport.
Doing a "lot of attempts" winds up getting one attempt noticed and tightening up security at that airport and possibly others, so "do a lot of attempts" breaks down quickly. What a lot of attempts could do is drain the budget of the TSA and of airlines: overwhelming the staff with hundreds or thousands of false positives over a day or a week would cost the TSA and the airlines many millions of dollars, Simply wiping or spraying enough nitrate residues on a an escalator handrail would expose hundreds, even thousands of people in a day to explosive detection and wipe out the resources and budget of many TSA offices.
Easy, because too many people in the general population thing it is a good thing that they are "At least trying to do something", and "What ever it takes to keep us safe". There is also a running theme where if a politician speak out about these things they get questioned in the media about how would they feel if a terror attack happened and it is implied that the blame would be placed on them. Love Rand Paul or hate him at least he has had the spine to provide a retort to these kind of accusations when they were leveled at him after his actions on Sunday over the PATRIOT act.
The solution is to make it so that the politicians know that this is unacceptable. This can be done by contacting them by mail, e-mail, and phone, writing letters to the editor, talking to their campaign people and letting them know when they are out glad handing for votes, but all of this requires effort. Also even if the majority of people don't hold the position most are still apathetic so all that is needed is to give the impression that the majority (a very vocal minority) is against this and things will change, probably slower than we want. It helps if a few get bounced out of office in very public ways like getting primaried out in a safe seat. This requires more effort as one has to get enough people to show up a a prescient level to get a candidate on the ballot, and then get enough people out in the primary to get rid of the incumbent. The TEA Party did this with a number of republicans so it could be done again, but should be done in both parties so they both get the picture.
Time to offend someone
If a terrorist wants to blow up a plane, they use a Surface to Air Missile from just outside the airport.
If they want to hijack a plane, it won't work anymore because the doors are heavily locked - any explosive capable of opening the cockpit door will crash the plane.
The routinely miss liquids - water, suntan lotion, etc. I traveled with someone that packed suntan lotion in a carry on bag and they missed it. They found and took the blade out of his safety razor, but missed the suntan lotion.
Even their own original studies claim that any benefit is far exceeded by the cost. The basic rule for MOST government agencies is if the cost exceeds $1 million per life saved, don't bother - smoke detectors cost $210,000 per life saved. http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/UCSBpf/readings/interventions.pdf
But the TSA argues they should be allowed to spend $10 million per life saved - and admit they actually cost $180 million per life saved. https://www.schneier.com/blog/...
Their budget should be cut to 1% of what it currently is, that way we will only be spending twice what we spend on other industries to save lives.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Try China. They have x-ray machines and wands at every subway station and, of course, airports. I sent my bags through dozens of times traveling around Beijing, I got 'wanded' dozens more times.
It was very obvious that almost all of the machines and wands were turned off. Camera in my pocket? Wand doesn't even beep. Dark screens on the x-ray machines, staff not even looking the few times when the screens were actually on, they never stopped or questioned anyone. They obviously didn't care, either.
I kind of liked their "we don't give a crap" attitude. It was very...China. Made me like the place even more.
Terrorism...yea... that thing.
Look carefully at the "underwear bomber." He was let onto the plan by an still unidentified Indian man. There are many who believe this was an FBI op. Shoe-bomber? Same shady situation. Even going back to the Pan-Am bombing, the CIA gave that man the explosives. They were suppose to give him non-functioning explosives. They actively sought to radicalize someone; making a criminal out of someone who wouldn't have been on their own. This is the definition of entrapment.
EVERY SINGLE AIRPORT related "attack" was directly caused by the US. Every security precaution is "security theatre." Those rape-a-scanners? Keep in mind that people who have repeated CAT scans for medical purposes have a higher risk for cancer. The effects build over time for continual exposure. In 20 years, we're gong to see frequent flyers with cancers directly related to body scanners.
The American media is not free. We live in a propaganda state. Oh brave new world, with such people in it.
That's only in Beijing and only during times of 'unrest'. Most of the year there is nothing, not even theater, so when they are ordered to dig out the wands, the batteries are dead and no one can remember how they work. Saudi Arabia is the best - do not wake the sleeping guards, it annoys them. Please walk around the detector with your luggage to prevent it from beeping. Thanks.
..which is NOT to detect weapons.
They're trained to detect common tools, water bottles, and other harmless items to harass people. This performance is what is incentivized and reinforced, so that's what is optimized.
Security theatre doesn't work. Security that works offends people.
C'est la vie. Shoes off!
..don't panic
They even once saved a plane from the pudding cup my daughter left in her backpack (which naturally earned her a pat-down).
My wife, then-infant daughter, and I had an interesting experience flying in the US: we often traveled with pre-packaged, ready-to-use UHT-sterilized bottles of formula just in case (a) my wife's milk production was insufficient at that moment and (b) we didn't have sufficient time or access to things like boiling water needed to make powdered formula. Since opening the sealed bottles defeats the point of UHT sterilization and starts the ~2 hour countdown after which the formula must be discarded, we asked them not to open the bottles.
Typically this was no problem: they did some swab tests, x-rayed the bottles, and concluded that they were (correctly) harmless. Additionally, they said that not opening the bottles meant that either my wife or I needed to get a pat-down but they let us choose who got the touchy-feely treatment. Obviously, any bad guys would have the one without concealed contraband get the search, thus defeating the purpose of the search.
At least that was better than Newark: the security screeners said they needed to do the swabbing and other tests before letting us proceed. However, the checkpoint was quite busy at the moment so they just had us stand around next to a table holding the bottles, my laptop, etc. for 10 minutes or so, then let us collect all the stuff and go. At no time were any of the tests they mentioned actually done.
The TSA clowns at airports are not government employees, they are private contractors. It the last resort for someone who wants to wear a uniform and have a badge but is too incompetent to be a mall cop. So it's no surprise that they have a 95% failure rate.
A huge chunk of taxpayer money gets wasted and there is little real world payoff. Make no mistake, the real big bucks go to the upper management, political insiders who grease the wheels for lucrative contracts. Just a division of the military industrial complex.
Another example: the Air Force just signed the very first contract with Boeing for commercial manned flights to the International Space Station. The Boeing crew vehicle hasn't even flown yet, unlike the SpaceX capsule which is now going through it's manned launch escape testing. Boeing is in bed with the AF, SpaceX isn't. All the AF guys know that they will just slide over to high paying jobs at Boeing when they retire, and there are lots of Congress Critters who get campaign contribution from Boeing, and want to protect defense jobs in their state.
Saving money? Competition? Innovation? Not even on the table. It's government of, by and for the insiders. And you are paying for it.
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