Entries Tagged "homeland security"

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Flying While Armed

Two years ago, all it took to bypass airport security was filling out a form:

Grant was flying from Boston to San Diego on Jan. 1, 2007, when he approached an American Airlines ticket counter at Logan International Airport and flashed a badge he carries as a part-time assistant harbor master in Chatham, according to federal prosecutors.

Grant, a medical supplies salesman, also filled out a “flying while armed” form and wrote that he worked for the Department of Homeland Security, prosecutors said.

[…]

He allegedly did the same on his return trip to Boston three days later.

But this time, according to court documents, he was invited into the cockpit, was told the identity of the two air marshals on the flight, and was informed who else on the plane was armed, which raises security concerns.

Since then, the TSA has made changes in procedure.

At the airport, law enforcers now need advance permission to fly armed.

“We have added substantial layers of security to this process,” said TSA spokesman George Naccara.

The case took almost two years to come to light so federal authorities could tighten airport security and prevent similar incidents, said Christina DiIorio-Sterling, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office.

“The flying public can be assured that this has led to a change of procedures to ensure that credentials are properly vetted,” said Ann Davis, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration.

Posted on December 9, 2008 at 7:22 AM • View Comments

TSA Aiding Luggage Thieves

In this story about luggage stealing at Los Angeles International Airport, we find this interesting paragraph:

They both say there are organized rings of thieves, who identify valuables in your checked luggage by looking at the TSA x-ray screens, then communicate with baggage handlers by text or cell phone, telling them exactly what to look for.

Someone should investigate the extent to which the TSA’s security measures facilitate crime.

Posted on December 2, 2008 at 2:15 PM • View Comments

When Sky Marshals Do Bad Things

They’re not even close to perfect:

Since 9/11, more than three dozen federal air marshals have been charged with crimes, and hundreds more have been accused of misconduct, an investigation by ProPublica, a non-profit journalism organization, has found. Cases range from drunken driving and domestic violence to aiding a human-trafficking ring and trying to smuggle explosives from Afghanistan.

The meta-problem is that the kind of person who wants to be federal air marshal is the exact kind of person we don’t want for the job.

Before 9/11, the Air Marshal Service was a nearly forgotten force of 33 agents with a $4.4 million annual budget. Now housed in the Transportation Security Administration, the agency has a $786 million budget and an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 air marshals, although the official number is classified.

And 3,000 to 4,000 is a lot of people to hire quickly; it’s hard to weed out the bad eggs.

Posted on November 21, 2008 at 6:23 AM • View Comments

Schneier for TSA Administrator

It’s been suggested. For the record, I don’t want the job.

Since the election, the newspapers and Internet have been flooded with unsolicited advice for President-elect Barack Obama. I’ll go ahead and add mine.

[…]

And by “revamp,” I mean “start over.” Most security experts agree that the rigmarole we go through at the airport is mere security theater, designed not to make us safer, but to make us feel safer by making it increasingly inconvenient to fly. TSA’s approach to security is too reactionary—too set on preventing attacks and attempted attacks that have already happened. And please, whatever you do, resist the temptation to let TSA workers unionize. Security from terror attacks should not be a federal jobs program. You need the authority to fire underperforming screeners quickly and effortlessly. Three game-changing possibilities to head up TSA: security guru Bruce Schneier, Cato Institute security and technology scholar Jim Harper, or Ohio State University’s John Mueller.

Although I’d be happy to see either Jim or John with it.

I don’t want it because it’s too narrow. I think the right thing for the government to do is to give the TSA a lot less money. I’d rather they defend against the broad threat of terrorism than focus on the narrow threat of airplane terrorism, and I’d rather they defend against the myriad of threats that face our society than focus on the singular threat of terrorism. But the head of the TSA can’t have those opinions; he has to take the money he’s given and perform the specific function he’s assigned to perform. Not very much fun, really.

But I’d be happy to advise whoever Obama choses to head the TSA.

The job of the nation’s CTO would be more interesting, but I don’t think I want it, either. (Have you seen the screening process?)

Posted on November 18, 2008 at 1:46 PM • View Comments

TSA News

Item 1: Kip Hawley says that the TSA may reduce size restrictions on liquids. You’ll still have to take them out of your bag, but they can be larger than three ounces. The reasons—so he states—are that technologies are getting better, not that the threat is reduced.

I’m skeptical, of course. But read his post; it’s interesting.

Item 2: Hawley responded to my response to his blog post about an article about me in The Atlantic.

Item 3: The Atlantic is holding a contest, based on Hawley’s comment that the TSA is basically there to catch stupid terrorists:

And so, a contest: How would the Hawley Principle of Federally-Endorsed Mediocrity apply to other government endeavors?

Not the same as my movie-plot threat contest, but fun all the same.

Item 4: What would the TSA make of this?

Posted on October 29, 2008 at 2:27 PM • View Comments

Me Helping Evade Airport Security

Great article from The Atlantic:

As we stood at an airport Starbucks, Schneier spread before me a batch of fabricated boarding passes for Northwest Airlines flight 1714, scheduled to depart at 2:20 p.m. and arrive at Reagan National at 5:47 p.m. He had taken the liberty of upgrading us to first class, and had even granted me “Platinum/Elite Plus” status, which was gracious of him. This status would allow us to skip the ranks of hoi-polloi flyers and join the expedited line, which is my preference, because those knotty, teeming security lines are the most dangerous places in airports: terrorists could paralyze U.S. aviation merely by detonating a bomb at any security checkpoint, all of which are, of course, entirely unsecured. (I once asked Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security, about this. “We actually ultimately do have a vision of trying to move the security checkpoint away from the gate, deeper into the airport itself, but there’s always going to be some place that people congregate. So if you’re asking me, is there any way to protect against a person taking a bomb into a crowded location and blowing it up, the answer is no.”)

Schneier and I walked to the security checkpoint. “Counterterrorism in the airport is a show designed to make people feel better,” he said. “Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.” This assumes, of course, that al-Qaeda will target airplanes for hijacking, or target aviation at all. “We defend against what the terrorists did last week,” Schneier said. He believes that the country would be just as safe as it is today if airport security were rolled back to pre-9/11 levels. “Spend the rest of your money on intelligence, investigations, and emergency response.”

Schneier and I joined the line with our ersatz boarding passes. “Technically we could get arrested for this,” he said, but we judged the risk to be acceptable. We handed our boarding passes and IDs to the security officer, who inspected our driver’s licenses through a loupe, one of those magnifying-glass devices jewelers use for minute examinations of fine detail. This was the moment of maximum peril, not because the boarding passes were flawed, but because the TSA now trains its officers in the science of behavior detection. The SPOT program—Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques—was based in part on the work of a psychologist who believes that involuntary facial-muscle movements, including the most fleeting “micro-expressions,” can betray lying or criminality. The training program for behavior-detection officers is one week long. Our facial muscles did not cooperate with the SPOT program, apparently, because the officer chicken-scratched onto our boarding passes what might have been his signature, or the number 4, or the letter y. We took our shoes off and placed our laptops in bins. Schneier took from his bag a 12-ounce container labeled “saline solution.”

“It’s allowed,” he said. Medical supplies, such as saline solution for contact-lens cleaning, don’t fall under the TSA’s three-ounce rule.

“What’s allowed?” I asked. “Saline solution, or bottles labeled saline solution?”

“Bottles labeled saline solution. They won’t check what’s in it, trust me.”

They did not check. As we gathered our belongings, Schneier held up the bottle and said to the nearest security officer, “This is okay, right?” “Yep,” the officer said. “Just have to put it in the tray.”

“Maybe if you lit it on fire, he’d pay attention,” I said, risking arrest for making a joke at airport security. (Later, Schneier would carry two bottles labeled saline solution—24 ounces in total—through security. An officer asked him why he needed two bottles. “Two eyes,” he said. He was allowed to keep the bottles.)

Posted on October 16, 2008 at 4:32 PM • View Comments

The Two Classes of Airport Contraband

Airport security found a jar of pasta sauce in my luggage last month. It was a 6-ounce jar, above the limit; the official confiscated it, because allowing it on the airplane with me would have been too dangerous. And to demonstrate how dangerous he really thought that jar was, he blithely tossed it in a nearby bin of similar liquid bottles and sent me on my way.

There are two classes of contraband at airport security checkpoints: the class that will get you in trouble if you try to bring it on an airplane, and the class that will cheerily be taken away from you if you try to bring it on an airplane. This difference is important: Making security screeners confiscate anything from that second class is a waste of time. All it does is harm innocents; it doesn’t stop terrorists at all.

Let me explain. If you’re caught at airport security with a bomb or a gun, the screeners aren’t just going to take it away from you. They’re going to call the police, and you’re going to be stuck for a few hours answering a lot of awkward questions. You may be arrested, and you’ll almost certainly miss your flight. At best, you’re going to have a very unpleasant day.

This is why articles about how screeners don’t catch every—or even a majority—of guns and bombs that go through the checkpoints don’t bother me. The screeners don’t have to be perfect; they just have to be good enough. No terrorist is going to base his plot on getting a gun through airport security if there’s a decent chance of getting caught, because the consequences of getting caught are too great.

Contrast that with a terrorist plot that requires a 12-ounce bottle of liquid. There’s no evidence that the London liquid bombers actually had a workable plot, but assume for the moment they did. If some copycat terrorists try to bring their liquid bomb through airport security and the screeners catch them—like they caught me with my bottle of pasta sauce—the terrorists can simply try again. They can try again and again. They can keep trying until they succeed. Because there are no consequences to trying and failing, the screeners have to be 100 percent effective. Even if they slip up one in a hundred times, the plot can succeed.

The same is true for knitting needles, pocketknives, scissors, corkscrews, cigarette lighters and whatever else the airport screeners are confiscating this week. If there’s no consequence to getting caught with it, then confiscating it only hurts innocent people. At best, it mildly annoys the terrorists.

To fix this, airport security has to make a choice. If something is dangerous, treat it as dangerous and treat anyone who tries to bring it on as potentially dangerous. If it’s not dangerous, then stop trying to keep it off airplanes. Trying to have it both ways just distracts the screeners from actually making us safer.

EDITED TO ADD (10/23): A similar article ran in The Guardian.

Posted on September 23, 2008 at 5:47 AM • View Comments

TSA Employees Bypassing Airport Screening

Airport screeners are now able to bypass airport screening:

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) rolled out the new uniforms and new screening policy at airports nationwide on Sept. 11.

The new policy says screeners can arrive for work and walk behind security lines without any of their belongings examined or X-rayed.

“Lunch or a bomb, you can walk right through with it,” said Mike Boyd, an aviation consultant in Evergreen. “This is a major security issue.”

Actually, it’s not. Screeners have to go in and out of security all the time as they work. Yes, they can smuggle things in and out of the airport. But you have to remember that the airport screeners are trusted insiders for the system: there are a zillion ways they could break airport security.

On the other hand, it’s probably a smart idea to screen screeners when they walk through airport security when they aren’t working at that checkpoint at that time. The reason is the same reason you should screen everyone, including pilots who can crash their plane: you’re not screening screeners (or pilots), you’re screening people wearing screener (or pilot) uniforms and carrying screener (or pilot) IDs. You can either train your screeners to recognize authentic uniforms and IDs, or you can just screen everybody. The latter is just easier.

But this isn’t a big deal.

Posted on September 19, 2008 at 8:01 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.