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TSA Replaces Security Chief As Tension Grows At Airports
HughPickens.com writes: Ron Nixon reports at the NYT that facing a backlash over long security lines and management problems, TSA administrator Peter V. Neffenger has shaken up his leadership team, replacing the agency's top security official Kelly Hoggan (Warning: source may be paywalled) and adding a new group of administrators at Chicago O'Hare International Airport. Beginning late that year, Hoggan received $90,000 in bonuses over a 13-month period, even though a leaked report from the Department of Homeland Security showed that auditors were able to get fake weapons and explosives past security screeners 95 percent of the time in 70 covert tests. Hoggan's bonus was paid out in $10,000 increments, an arrangement that members of Congress have said was intended to disguise the payments. During a hearing of the House Oversight Committee two weeks ago, lawmakers grilled Mr. Neffenger about the bonus, which was issued before he joined the agency in July. Last week and over the weekend, hundreds of passengers, including 450 on American Airlines alone, missed flights because of waits of two or three hours in security lines, according to local news reports. Many of the passengers had to spend the night in the terminal sleeping on cots. The TSA has sent 58 additional security officers and four more bomb-sniffing dog teams to O'Hare. Several current and former TSA employees said the moves to replace Hoggan and add the new officials in Chicago, where passengers have endured hours long waits at security checkpoints, were insufficient. "The timing of this decision is too late to make a real difference for the summer," says Andrew Rhoades, an assistant federal security director at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport who testified his supervisor accused him of "going native" after attending a meeting at a local mosque and that TSA's alleged practice of "directed reassignments," or unwanted job transfers were intended to punish employees who speak their minds. "Neffenger is only doing this because the media and Congress are making him look bad."
Better yet, shut down DHS all together since apparently they're nothing more than a multi-trillion drain on tax dollars.
When have they ever thwarted a terrorist threat that wasn't set up by them in a sting operation where they themselves supplied a mentally ill degenerate with explosives?
Never.
That's a bad idea. All a terrorist would have to do is watch the line and wait for it to get long enough, or know the peak times that they can get in line and just waltze right through with no screening at all.
What they need to do instead is randomly pull passengers from the line and direct them through the fast track line instead so as to ease the load on the line and make it move faster. That way there is still a random chance that any passenger will get fully screened, and if you're not selected to be fast tracked you can't avoid the screening, but it has the effect of speeding up the queue which is drastically needed.
Windows is a bonfire, Linux is the sun. Linux only looks smaller if you lack perspective.
I wouldn't, as I actually understand that it is impossible for the government to stop all terrorism. However night now if a terrorist were to bomb the huge security lines that the TSA is creating and a loved one were to die in that I would consider suing the government. The reason here is that the actions that the TSA is undertaking currently are making us less safe by providing a large mass of people in a single spot so the government is actively making us less safe. I have written my useless congress critters (Kline, Klobuchar, and Franken) on this issue stating that the TSA's actions are making us less safe but they don't care. What they need are more checkpoints for people to enter the "secure" area of airports instead of fewer but that is not how things are going.
Time to offend someone