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TSA Fails To Find Links To Terrorism of Airport Workers
schwit1 writes: An audit of the TSA has found that the agency failed to uncover the terrorist connections of 73 aviation workers when it did background checks of them. According to a report released Monday, the people were employed by major airlines, airport vendors and other employers, and were not identified because the agency lacked access to terrorism-related information from within the government. The agency's "multi-layered process to vet aviation workers for potential links to terrorism was generally effective. In addition to initially vetting every application for new credentials, TSA recurrently vetted aviation workers with access to secured areas of commercial airports every time the Consolidated Terrorist Watchlist was updated," the report found. "However, our testing showed that TSA did not identify 73 individuals with terrorism-related category codes because TSA is not authorized to receive all terrorism-related information under current interagency watchlisting policy." This report comes on the heels of an internal TSA investigation that found 95% of agents testing airport checkpoints were able to bring weapons through.
First there was the disastrous results of the audit (95% failure rate). Top dog resigns. Now we find out that the TSA does not even have the proper inter-departmental authority. If this wasn't a serious matter it would absolutely hilarious.
Cue the Benny Hill theme in 4...3...2...1
I wish the report would go into some detail about how close the ties that these workers have to terrorism were, even if they were anonymized. Were they members or former members of a terrorist group? Is one of their family members or close personal friends a terrorist? It's still a failure to find these people before hiring them, but there's a big difference between "We found that 73 people were former members of a group or groups classified as a terrorist organization" and "We found that 73 people had donated money to the wrong charity or have a distant relative that might be a member of a terrorist organization."
All the report says is that the 73 people were divided into 5 categories and that the TSA didn't have clearance for all 5 categories.
I mean, if the workers *are* terrorists then they should be arrested, right? Short of that there are countless ways a non-terrorist can be "linked" with terrorists, and due to the "six degrees of separation" phenomenon it's quite common to have surprising looking connections.
For example Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan and I happen to have a common common friend. I met the friend through work and Bandar knew him because his family was a neighbor in Aspen where Bandar has a house. And since Bandar is in the Saudi royal family and Osama bin Laden belonged to a prominent Saudi family, it's almost certain that Bandar knew him from before his Mujahideen days in Afghanistan. So I'm only two two acquaintances removed from Osama bin Laden. That sounds alarming! But in fact I've never *met* Bandar, in fact I've never met any Saudis at all.
I've been racking my brains for people I've met from the actual Middle East, and it turns out that at one point in my career met the Egyptian-American space researcher Farouk el-Baz (who has a TNG shuttlecraft named after him!). El-Baz comes from a connected family; his brother for example was high up in Hosni Mubarak's government, and Farouk himself was at one time a science adviser to Anwar Sadat. It's a fair bet that he knows somebody from Egypt who later went on to be involved with the Muslim Brotherhood -- it wouldn't reflect on him at all. But if that were true I'd be just one acquaintance away from a direct "connection" with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Now it also happens that my wife went to graduate school with someone who was the first woman valedictorian of the US Naval academy. Since I know her directly, I have all kinds of one-degree of separation relationships to people in all kinds of sensitive military and national security positions. I also two different one-degree of separation connections to the Clintons and current Secretary of State John Kerry. If you count my "connections" to my college professors at MIT I'm one-degree of separation away from several Manhattan Project scientists.
If you plotted out my social network to two or three links away it'd look remarkable, in some cases even disturbing. But it's not. "Connection" means almost nothing. There have been cases of people "connected" to terrorists because the frequently called the same number -- a Manhattan pizza restaurant.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This is pretty much what the security people associated with that audit said. There is a program for "fast tracking" airline passengers, with pre-screening (like CAPPS) and such. Yet very few know about it, and the TSA doesn't really advertise it very well.
In a somewhat related note, the TSA has almost grounded all flights by not doing proper change management. They repeatedly will begin some server / database maintenance without telling anyone, so we who monitor those systems start getting all sorts of alarms. The last time the TSA pulled down the no-fly database for some maintenance we were about 5 minutes out from alerting the FAA and the whole system going into a lock-down. After some frantic phone calls the TSA was just like "oh yeah, we forgot to tell anyone". From my perspective, they are just as "dangerous" as these "terrorists". Even the terrorists would have a hard time grounding all flights without any violence like has almost happened.
Should I care? If so why? They redacted even summary information categorizing what makes these people "suspicious". Is there any public information anyone can use to quantify the risk?
For all anyone knows "links to terrorism" means TSA employee once delivered a pizza to a network admin who prefers IS-IS to OSPF.
Have to love in a supposed free society maintenance of secret lists compiled using secret methods and criteria. A list whose names have no opportunity to know what they are even accused of let alone defend themselves.