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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
Slashdot fails to find links to grammar of headlines.
How about "TSA Fails to Find Airport Workers' Links to Terrorism" instead? Unless the TSA was investigating the terrorism of airport workers, that headline is a little bit off.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
... that the Theater Security Agency has failed to discoverer 1 terrorist.
The Onion has reported the new TSA plan:
http://www.theonion.com/articl...
I think it'll be much better than the previous one.
So in other words. giving every passenger a cudgel on the way to their seat and locking the damned cabin door would be a cheaper, more effective means of on-plane security.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
there is probably some government "watchlist" that assumes all airport workers are terrorists and any slight joke or 7th degree link is considered corroborating evidence.
fuck you all. you're the terrorists.
Everyone working for the TSA is a potential terrorist, 73 are one some list somewhere.
This.
And of the 73 on a list somewhere; i bet only a fraction are even slightly a threat; and i hope they don't lose their job simply because some distant uncle who sends them a gift on their birthday attended a rally where some actual terrorists also went...
My karma is good, so I think I need to off burn some excess. Mod me as you will.
What the TSA and every other TLA agency can't protect against: a previously law-abiding person who decides that they must act against America. Their first criminal act may be the one that kills. The 9/11 hijackers did nothing illegal until well after the cabin doors of their aircraft closed.
The TSA can't do shit against someone who has a brain and patience. Not. a. fucking. thing.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
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.
And that's because we're being kind.
If anything, it's an expensive waste of time and resources that makes terrorism more likely, especially when combined with unnecessary and counter-productive unconstitutional search and seizure and monitoring of American citizens in America, when the only useful actionable intel we have ever had has been due to intel gathering that started in the Middle East.
Period.
Living in Fear is the wrong answer. Americans are made of sterner stuff than that.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Wait, "Airport Workers" is a terrorist organization? But the airports are crawling with them...
Or perhaps the same inter-departmental politics are still going on? Agencies don't trust one another and are reluctant to share information, for fear that the other guy will take credit. Same reason the NSA was set up - to solve bickering between the FBI and the CIA. Yeah, well, that didn't turn out so well either.
And the worst thing: The only useful intel from there is HUMINT, when the only thing that interests "the" (american intelligence) "community" is SIGINT, ie playing with fancy toys and slurping up everyone's digital dataaaah. It is no coincidence that the TSA paid for lots of pervy scanners, much of which still sits crated in storage. And, of course, the no fly lists and the secret rules, and the inevitable trampling of rights that ensues, and so on.
Sadly you are correct.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And that's because we're being kind.
If anything, it's an expensive waste of time and resources that makes terrorism more likely, especially when combined with unnecessary and counter-productive unconstitutional search and seizure and monitoring of American citizens in America, when the only useful actionable intel we have ever had has been due to intel gathering that started in the Middle East.
You're assuming the job of the TSA is to stop terrorists. All evidence points against this conclusion. The TSA is not a CT organisation, it's a PR organisation. The idea is not to stop threats rather it is to simply make Americans feel safer. This is why the key metric of the TSA is not how many terrorists or guns they find, but how safe the average traveller feels.
Also whilst intelligence gathering is a better approach to stopping terrorism than draconian laws, tyrannical airport cops and unnecessary, destructive wars, why limit it to the Middle East? Terrorists can come from anywhere. South America and Eastern Europe are hotbeds of activity, even Ireland was just a few decades ago and whilst technically not terrorists, western nations face more risk from Russian crime syndicates than Islamic extremists.
What the US needs to do is to stop making enemies. Prevention is better than cure.
Americans are made of sterner stuff than that.
Empirical evidence suggests otherwise.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
the whole TSA security model for is ass backwards.
Rather than anally probing the passangers, do a background check... on all of them. Make that a part of the security process.
Have two lines.
Line one is for people that went through a background check. They can go through a metal detector, with their shoes on, thank you have a nice day.
Then you have another line for people that didn't go through a background check and they get to take their shoes off etc.
Let everyone that wants to go through the faster line pay the government 20-50 bucks for a background check and then we're done.
All the frequent fliers will have the new card and will just bypass most of the security.
This is how it should work.
And obviously anyone actually working for the TSA would be expected to go through a fucking background check.
Here someone will say "they did but no one noticed they had terrorist ties"... then you're apparently hiring circus monkeys to do the background checks. Hire human beings to do it. Next issue.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.
Dear sweet jeebus, can we please just dismantle the TSA and give security back to the airlines, now?
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
fail
Suddenly, this isn't so funny any more.
Have gnu, will travel.
is that when you ask a private company to do law enforcement and don't give them all the information they need (like CROSSAGENCY BACKGROUND CHECKS), shit will slip through the dragnet. For some strange reason, the Government won't let certain information pass into the hands of privately owned data mining concerns such as the Criminal Records Bureau and the Independent Safeguarding Authority (now conglomerated into the Disclosure & Barring Service); the information they do hold - for which they charge exhorbitant fees to access even if negative or null results are returned - is also *freely* available through a bit of Google mining.
Prime examples and how the criminals defeat the system: child protection services in the the UK. How do the paedophiles get around enhanced background checks? Simple. THEY ASSUME A DIFFERENT NAME. This is pretty much how the predators get access to other people's kids. They insinuate themselves into positions of trust. New name, no CRB records, no court records, no police records. Next thing you know, a familiar face with a different name is caught fucking a nursery full of two year olds. Angela Allen. Vanessa George. Colin Blanchard. Or salivating over a sunday school class of boys, while at the same time perjuring oneself to enable child snatching and trafficking under colour of Law, and/or claiming expertise and/or qualification in a protected field when no record exists of such study in order to gain a position of trust. Andrew Kawalek. George Hibbert. Roy Meadow. Or hanging around public conveniences for the sole purpose of having sex with strange men in one of the most unclean environments you can possibly imagine. Charles Lynton (his other name should be very familiar to a lot of people and it doesn't take a lot of working out, and then wondering why the entire Bow Street Magistrates Records of Session is currently inaccessible to ANYONE but the London City Archive curator).
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Their working up to making one three-letter-agency that operates as a secret police force.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
but not fingernail clippers or water, so SUCCESS! Why do we have security again? Is it all a puppet show?
"terrorism-related category codes" what does this even mean? And "initial for a first name and missing social security numbers", those get a free pass too per OIG-15-98. "Social security number (SSN) is not currently a required field on the aviation worker credential application" quite surprising, as that is the primary means for tracking a worker. And "TSA did not receive certain terrorism-related category codes as part of the watchlist extract they used for vetting" tells me that it wasn't the TSA but whomever is compiling the list FOR the TSA that screwed up on this.
I finally found http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/C..., which has a list on page two. Still don't know if these are the "category codes" as mentioned though...it's all rather obscure. Interesting that "controlled substances" is mentioned twice as much as murder.
What degree of separation is a potential terrorist? You don't need to get that far from me to find bad records, but I'm in no way a murderer, drug dealer, or terrorist. You can find them quick n the social web though.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Ok so the question now is, what will be done about this?
The DHS discovered the fact that TSA couldn't vet these employees. The DHS made six recommendations, and the TSA agreed with the recommendations. Will President Obama, or Francis Taylor (the Acting Administrator of the TSA), or Jeh Johnson (the head of the DHS), push to fix the communication problems? Or will they just shake their heads, and worry about the political fallout?
When are you getting your cars back? You need to buy out the Taupo track for a day and invite everyone over.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
Are people being rounded up at night and disappeared?
No, we haven't gotten there yet. Patience, all will be revealed in due time.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
We're talking about people who, on purpose, took a job where they sexually abuse people for money. And then they proceed to do the job. We're so used to American prisons being a rape factory that we don't mind getting raped in order to get on an airplane? I guess the world really is a prison cell... in America
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Even though they missed these obvious connections, and even though the TSA misses 95% of all threatening bottles of liquid over 3 oz.
Nothing happened.
Meanwhile, over 30,000 people died in traffic accidents in 2014.
Something is wrong here.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Sure, let's list everything so the enemies can know exactly how to stay off the lists. Idiot.
Just another day in Paradise