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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."
How can such failures even get their pay checks, let alone bonuses?
USA, land of the corrupted.
And have the TSA pull out?
>> TSA administrator Peter V. Neffenger has shaken up his leadership team
Translated: thrown his #2 under the bus in the hopes he gets blamed for the #1 guy screwing up.
More realistically, the command to slow down came from the top, to put political pressure on Congress to increase the TSA's budget. (Remember all the news stories crying about "not enough staffing" a few weeks ago?)
It's really time to disband the agency, only now it will be impossible since there are entrenched federal jobs.
The entire TSA thing seems to be a farce and a fraud, little more than security theatre as so many security specialists have described it over many years. I suspect the TSA knows this too, but they probably don't care or they'd have done something about it by now.
Indeed, their main interest in practice may be to siphon American tax dollars into contractor pockets and nothing else. Their real goal clearly isn't effective security nor dollar efficiency nor streamlining public air transport, so what explanations are left?
In an organization built upon such flawed foundations, it's almost natural that the top honchos are lining their own pockets with ill-founded bonuses. The whole thing stinks from top to bottom.
60,000 employees, a $7.5B budget, and all they have to show for it is $90K in graft?
If they privatized that train wreck of a federal agency into a train wreck of a corporation, their top brass would be getting millions in unearned bonuses, millions more in golden parachutes, and that's not even counting the embezzlement.
Government inefficiency at it's worst.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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.
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.
All a terrorist has to do right now is walk up to the line at the time of their choosing, at any airport in America, and press a detonator button. Boom, lots of dead people. And yet this isn't happening. Not because of any heroic TSA screening efforts, mind you; that line is outside the secure area, and always will be by definition. There just aren't that many bogeymen out there.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Actually, I think the terrorists have taken jobs in the TSA and are now engaged in a Denial of Service attack on our travellers (by not letting them get through security in time to catch their flights). Seems like we are all now (justifiably) terrified of not making our flights...
That's your fault. The airlines here have said for more than a year now that you should arrive at the airport at least two hours early.
No.
It's the corrupt, authoritarian, and incompetent US governments' fault for instituting the corrupt, authoritarian, and incompetent TSA to begin with.
Arrival with time enough to check in any luggage at the airline, walk through a metal detector and an explosives sniffer at the gate, and that should be plenty. Call it 20 minutes, 30 tops for a busy hub.
A requirement for arrival 2 or 3 hours early is insanity.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Many years ago, I'd fly to Tel Aviv on El Al. They also had a three hour wait. However, that was to allow enough time for each passenger to have a lengthy interview with the Shin Bet agents who manage security where they did the behavioural screening. That interview was never shorter than five minutes and could last up to 20 pretty easily. But no-one missed their flights.
Totally different security threat matrix than in the US. The US threat matrix is not anywhere even close to the level of the clear, present, and ongoing threat level in Israel, being surrounded as it is by many much larger and very hostile nations and nation-states.
The comparison is stark, as El Al security is actually about *true* security against a very real threat, whereas the TSA is about the *appearance* of security against a mostly (now that cockpit doors lock and passengers pile on to curb-stomp would-be hijackers/terrorists) imaginary.threat while making further inroads on civil rights, "normalizing" the appearance of security checkpoints and "Papieren, bitte! Schnell!" in public perception, and funneling more of your money to their private-sector crony accomplices who then help elect/re-elect them and kick money back through other mechanisms as well like private charities/funds, etc etc.
The role of the TSA in conditioning the public can be summed up with one game-meme.
"Pick up that can!"
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Be careful what you wish for. Terrorists have already started attacking the area outside the secure zone and other soft targets like sports stadiums in Europe.
I don't think anyone is "wishing for" this, except for a TINY number of insane people.
I do wonder why this sort of attack is less common in the US.
Umm, "this sort of attack" isn't "COMMON" in Europe either. There have been a few high-profile isolated incidents. There have also been a few high-profile isolated mass shootings, etc. in Europe in recent years. Neither of these things qualifies as "common."
And the reason they are "less common" (i.e., DON'T EVER HAPPEN) in the U.S. is because the idea that there are tens of thousands of terrorists just ready with the desire AND the means to attack the U.S. at any moment is -- and has always been -- a myth.
Look -- do you even remember what things were like in the U.S. after 9/11? I do. For months, people were rationally scared of just these sorts of things. They weren't just afraid of planes being hijacked, they were afraid of people with bombs OUTSIDE the security zones at airports, so they put extra security in effect at many airports even extending outside the outer doors to the airport.
People were afraid of terrorists doing all sorts of thing -- blowing up Times Square, putting poisons in unprotected water supplies to cities, even blowing up your local shopping mall. I had a very good friend who had heard about all the people talking about these sorts of things on the news, and he was afraid to go to malls -- he avoided them for months after 9/11. Yet none of this happened, and the public gradually forgot about it.
If there were anywhere near the number of terrorists the TSA wants us to believe there are, there would be all sorts of things blowing up all over the U.S. Take a look at a country that actually had SERIOUS terrorism -- Israel, England at the height of the IRA activity, etc. Then you'd have suicide bombers getting on a bus in a major city, or walking into a large crowd... this stuff is NOT hard.
But, as you point out, it doesn't happen in the U.S. The only people who actually attempt to get on planes and do something are STUPID terrorists who can't even figure out there would be so many more easy ways to cause mayhem.
TL;DR: (1) If there were terrorists, bad stuff could happen anywhere. (2) It doesn't, so there aren't that many terrorists. Q.E.D. (3) The only terrorists we might hope to protect against through enhanced TSA security are the most stupid ones -- anyone actually interested in planning a serious attack would never target a plane in the U.S. when there are so many easier targets.