Thread: Sizing Up the People Who Tell Us to Take Our Shoes Off

Sizing Up the People Who Tell Us to Take Our Shoes Off

By SEWELL CHAN and RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

August 13, 2006

After the Sept. 11 attacks, no item on the federal agenda was tackled as quickly and broadly as aviation security.

There were calls to secure cockpit doors, hire armed air marshals, update passenger “watch lists” — Washington was inundated with ideas for preventing a jetliner from being hijacked and destroyed again.

In less than three months, a split second in Beltway time, Congress and President Bush had agreed to one of most crucial proposals: a new corps of federal workers to screen passengers and bags at airports.

With the disclosure last week of a plot to bomb airplanes flying over the Atlantic with liquid or gel explosives, those workers are again a focus of attention as a vital line of defense against terrorism. But it is a seriously flawed line, some security consultants and government officials say. The federal workers under the Department of Homeland Security who replaced the screeners hired by private contractors remain a weak link in aviation safety.

In exercises by undercover government workers, and experiences with real passengers, screeners repeatedly failed to prevent weapons from being taken aboard airliners. And their ranks have shrunk since 2003 even as air travel has increased.

The screeners — who experts emphasize are better over all than when they were hired by private contractors — still earn relatively low wages, have a high rate of attrition, receive what many regard as too little training and operate inadequate equipment.

It is this 43,000-person workforce that is now responsible for enforcing the new ban on most liquids in carry-on luggage, and making nuanced distinctions between suspicious substances and innocuous ones.

Representative John L. Mica, a Florida Republican who was an architect of the current system, said its record was so dismal that a drastic overhaul was needed.

“If the system implodes,’’ he said, “it might be one of the better things, because it might force action.”

The answer, he said, is to invest heavily in technology that can detect weapons, and rely less on human skills — a view seconded by some security experts.

Yolanda Clark, spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration, part of the Homeland Security Department, disputed criticism of the agency, saying that the screeners were well trained and effective.

More important, she said, they are “just one of many” levels of protection. There is more robust security than in 2001, she said, including more luggage X-ray machines, air marshals and chemical detection devices.

Her agency, created two months after 9/11, had a rocky start — millions wasted in the rush to hire, reliance on dubious contractors, even an inability to pay people on time, according to several government reports.

Among the most serious problems that were discovered was that the agency hired hundreds of screeners with criminal records, in some cases for felonies as serious as manslaughter and rape. Reports of thefts soared as more bags than ever were inspected by hand.

“T.S.A. was so focused on meeting the Congressional deadlines that they cut a lot of corners,” said Clark Kent Ervin, who was inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 and 2004.

Ms. Clark, the spokeswoman, said those early problems were corrected long ago. But critics say problems remain with salaries, training and attrition.

The starting salary for screeners is less than $24,000, and some are hired without high school diplomas. People who do specialized work like reading X-rays are no better paid those who ask people to take their shoes off.

Each year, fewer than 20 percent of screeners leave the job, Ms. Clark said. But the agency has such trouble keeping up with those losses that this year it began paying a $500 bonus to anyone who lasts a year.

Ms. Clark said the screeners receive 60 hours of classroom training and 40 hours on the job, as well as periodic retraining. Some 18,000 of them received special training in recognizing explosives and bomb parts.

Yet the Government Accountability Office reported in April that investigators slipped bomb components past checkpoints at all 21 airports tried. The components could be combined onboard to make an explosive — the very strategy British authorities say plotters in England planned to use.

Ms. Clark declined to address the specifics of that report, but she called it flawed.

Passengers have their own tales of lapses. At Kennedy International Airport on Friday, two travelers, Lee and Annie Barreiro of Florida, said that they had recently taken a steak knife past a security checkpoint in their hometown airport. “They let a lot get through,” Mr. Barreiro said.

Private security experts say the airport screeners would be hard-pressed to stop sophisticated terrorists.

“These screeners were not particularly well trained to do the jobs they were hired to do, and now they’re having something completely different thrown at them,” said Michael J. Boyd, president of an aviation and security consulting firm in Evergreen, Colo.

Like Representative Mica, he said technology must play a bigger role.

But Mr. Ervin said: “Technology is ultimately only as good as the people operating it. They need to be better trained and supervised.”

Richard W. Bloom, a psychologist and counterterrorism expert at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz., said the government should stop having screeners do the same rote tasks hour after hour. “How long can you look at a screen before any normal person is going to lose their performance efficiency?” he asked.

The system has its defenders, like Representative Dan Lungren, a California Republican and member of the Homeland Security Committee, though he said his confidence in it was new. He said that Kip Hawley, administrator of the Transportation Security Administration — the fourth in that job since 2002 — has responded nimbly to new threats, like liquid explosives. And he praised the decision to lift a post-9/11 ban on items like nail clippers and small scissors.

In each of the last two years, the Bush administration has asked for a big increase in the $5 security fee added to a round-trip ticket price, contending that it was needed for improved screening. The airline industry has strenuously fought the proposal. Last year, Congress rejected the request, and it has not yet acted on this year’s.

Michael Amon contributed reporting for this article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/weeki ... ref=slogin

In my opinion, the TSA is a joke. The concept behind the TSA is a joke, and pretty much everything that our bloated federal government tries to do is a joke. Our government is so hamstrung by political correctness that it will waste our time and its money making Anglo businessmen and Japanese grannies take off their shoes and submit to intrusive searches while it intentionally skips over suspicious Middle Eastern men because it can't risk offending them.

Before Muslim men hijacked those aircraft on 9/11/01, we all were pretty confident that enough was being done to reasonably assure our safety against terrorist attacks. After 9/11 was committed by Muslim men, we implemented tighter restrictions on everyone to reduce the risk. Then another Muslim man tried to detonate a shoe bomb, so we ALL had to start taking our shoes off. Then some Muslim men hatched a plot to use binary liquid explosives hidden in drink bottles to blow up planes, and now NONE OF US are allowed to even carry a beverage aboard.

It seems to me that each and every threat that has led to an escalation in airport security (and I'm going back to things like the bombing attacks of embassies and barracks that changed parking rules) has been linked to a Muslim. That tells me that we have a pretty good handle on who the enemy is. Yet our braindead leaders crippled by political correctness insist on wasting our tax dollars subjecting blue-haired old Anglo-Saxon women from Kansas to anal probes and making us waddle along in our sock feet rather than simply screening those we know to be members of the quite well-defined group that poses the threat. It would be a sad little joke if not for the fact that travellers and taxpayers are spending a fortune for this idiocy while being grossly inconvenienced when such inconvenience is TOTALLY UNNECESSARY for people who are not of the group posing the threat.

I agree with you.