Entries Tagged "homeland security"

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TSA Follies

They break planes:

Citing sources within the aviation industry, ABC News reports an overzealous TSA employee attempted to gain access to the parked aircraft by climbing up the fuselage… reportedly using the Total Air Temperature (TAT) probes mounted to the planes’ noses as handholds.

“The brilliant employees used an instrument located just below the cockpit window that is critical to the operation of the onboard computers,” one pilot wrote on an American Eagle internet forum. “They decided this instrument, the TAT probe, would be adequate to use as a ladder.”

They harass innocents:

James Robinson is a retired Air National Guard brigadier general and a commercial pilot for a major airline who flies passenger planes around the country.

He has even been certified by the Transportation Security Administration to carry a weapon into the cockpit as part of the government’s defense program should a terrorist try to commandeer a plane.

But there’s one problem: James Robinson, the pilot, has difficulty even getting to his plane because his name is on the government’s terrorist “watch list.”

It’s easy to sneak by them:

The third-grader has been on the watch list since he was 5 years old. Asked whether he is a terrorist, he said, “I don’t know.”

Though he doesn’t even know what a terrorist is, he is embarrassed that trips to the airport cause a ruckus, said his mother, Denise Robinson.

[…]

Denise Robinson says she tells the skycaps her son is on the list, tips heavily and is given boarding passes. And booking her son as “J. Pierce Robinson” also has let the family bypass the watch list hassle.

And here’s how to sneak lockpicks past them.

EDITED TO ADD (8/21): Ha ha ha ha:

Even though its inspector’s actions caused nine American Eagle planes
to be grounded in Chicago this week, the Transporatation Security
Administration says it may pursue action against the airline for
security lapses.

And a step in the right direction:

A federal appeals court ruled this week that individuals who are blocked from commercial flights by the federal no-fly list can challenge their detention in federal court.

Posted on August 21, 2008 at 9:12 AM • View Comments

Laptop with Trusted Traveler Identities Stolen

Oops. A laptop with the names of 33,000 people enrolled in the Clear program—the most popular airport “trusted traveler” program—has been stolen at SFO. The TSA is unhappy.

Stealing databases of personal information is never good, but this doesn’t make a bit of difference to airport security. I’ve already written about the Clear program: it’s a $100-a-year program that lets you cut the security line, and nothing more. Clear members are no more trusted than anyone else.

Anyway, it’s easy to fly without an ID, as long as you claim to have lost it. And it’s also easy to get through airport security without being an actual airplane passenger.

None of this is security. Absolutely none of it.

EDITED TO ADD (8/7): The laptop has been found. Turns out it was never stolen:

The laptop was found Tuesday morning in the same company office where it supposedly had gone missing, said spokeswoman Allison Beer.

“It was not in an obvious location,” said Beer, who said an investigation was under way to determine whether the computer was actually stolen or had just been misplaced.

Why in the world do these people not use full-disk encryption?

Posted on August 5, 2008 at 12:09 PM • View Comments

TSA Proud of Confiscating Non-Dangerous Item

This is just sad. The TSA confiscated a battery pack not because it’s dangerous, but because other passengers might think it’s dangerous. And they’re proud of the fact.

“We must treat every suspicious item the same and utilize the tools we have available to make a final determination,” said Federal Security Director David Wynn. “Procedures are in place for a reason and this is a clear indication our workforce is doing a great job.”

My guess is that if Kip Hawley were allowed to comment on my blog, he would say something like this: “It’s not just bombs that are prohibited; it’s things that look like bombs. This looks enough like a bomb to fool the other passengers, and that in itself is a threat.”

Okay, that’s fair. But the average person doesn’t know what a bomb looks like; all he knows is what he sees on television and the movies. And this rule means that all homemade electronics are confiscated, because anything homemade with wires can look like a bomb to someone who doesn’t know better. The rule just doesn’t work.

And in today’s passengers-fight-back world, do you think anyone is going to successfully do anything with a fake bomb?

Posted on July 30, 2008 at 6:11 AM • View Comments

Cost/Benefit Analysis of Airline Security

This report, “Assessing the risks, costs and benefits of United States aviation security measures” by Mark Stewart and John Mueller, is excellent reading:

The United States Office of Management and Budget has recommended the use of cost-benefit assessment for all proposed federal regulations. Since 9/11 government agencies in Australia, United States, Canada, Europe and elsewhere have devoted much effort and expenditure to attempt to ensure that a 9/11 type attack involving hijacked aircraft is not repeated. This effort has come at considerable cost, running in excess of US$6 billion per year for the United States Transportation Security Administration (TSA) alone. In particular, significant expenditure has been dedicated to two aviation security measures aimed at preventing terrorists from hijacking and crashing an aircraft into buildings and other infrastructure: (i) Hardened cockpit doors and (ii) Federal Air Marshal Service. These two security measures cost the United States government and the airlines nearly $1 billion per year. This paper seeks to discover whether aviation security measures are cost-effective by considering their effectiveness, their cost and expected lives saved as a result of such expenditure. An assessment of the Federal Air Marshal Service suggests that the annual cost is $180 million per life saved. This is greatly in excess of the regulatory safety goal of $1-$10 million per life saved. As such, the air marshal program would seem to fail a cost-benefit analysis. In addition, the opportunity cost of these expenditures is considerable, and it is highly likely that far more lives would have been saved if the money had been invested instead in a wide range of more cost-effective risk mitigation programs. On the other hand, hardening of cockpit doors has an annual cost of only $800,000 per life saved, showing that this is a cost-effective security measure.

From the body:

Hardening cockpit doors has the highest risk reduction (16.67%) at lowest additional cost of $40 million. On the other hand, the Federal Air Marshal Service costs $900 million pa but reduces risk by only 1.67%. The Federal Air Marshal Service may be more cost-effective if it is able to show extra benefit over the cheaper measure of hardening cockpit doors. However, the Federal Air Marshal Service seems to have significantly less benefit which means that hardening cockpit doors is the more cost-effective measure.

Cost-benefit analysis is definitely the way to look at these security measures. It’s hard for people to do, because it requires putting a dollar value on a human life—something we can’t possibly do with our own. But as a society, it is something we do again and again: when we raise or lower speed limits, when we ban a certain pesticide, when we enact building codes. Insurance companies do it all the time. We do it implicitly, because we can’t talk about it explicitly. I think there is considerable value in talking about it.

(Note the table on page 5 of the report, which lists the cost per lives saved for a variety of safety and security measures.)

The final paper will eventually be published in the Journal of Transportation Security. I never even knew there was such a thing.

EDITED TO ADD (8/13): New York Times op-ed on the subject.

Posted on July 21, 2008 at 5:53 AM • View Comments

Homeland Security Cost-Benefit Analysis

This is an excellent paper by Ohio State political science professor John Mueller. Titled “The Quixotic Quest for Invulnerability: Assessing the Costs, Benefits, and Probabilities of Protecting the Homeland,” it lays out some common send premises and policy implications.

The premises:

1. The number of potential terrorist targets is essentially infinite.

2. The probability that any individual target will be attacked is essentially zero.

3. If one potential target happens to enjoy a degree of protection, the agile terrorist usually can readily move on to another one.

4. Most targets are “vulnerable” in that it is not very difficult to damage them, but invulnerable in that they can be rebuilt in fairly short order and at tolerable expense.

5. It is essentially impossible to make a very wide variety of potential terrorist targets invulnerable except by completely closing them down.

The policy implications:

1. Any protective policy should be compared to a “null case”: do nothing, and use the money saved to rebuild and to compensate any victims.

2. Abandon any effort to imagine a terrorist target list.

3. Consider negative effects of protection measures: not only direct cost, but inconvenience, enhancement of fear, negative economic impacts, reduction of liberties.

4. Consider the opportunity costs, the tradeoffs, of protection measures.

Here’s the abstract:

This paper attempts to set out some general parameters for coming to grips with a central homeland security concern: the effort to make potential targets invulnerable, or at least notably less vulnerable, to terrorist attack. It argues that protection makes sense only when protection is feasible for an entire class of potential targets and when the destruction of something in that target set would have quite large physical, economic, psychological, and/or political consequences. There are a very large number of potential targets where protection is essentially a waste of resources and a much more limited one where it may be effective.

The whole paper is worth reading.

Posted on July 17, 2008 at 6:43 AM • View Comments

Good Essay on TSA Stupidity

From Salon:

“You ain’t takin’ this through,” she says. “No knives. You can’t bring a knife through here.”

It takes a moment for me to realize that she’s serious. “I’m … but … it’s …”

“Sorry.” She throws it into a bin and starts to walk away.

“Wait a minute,” I say. “That’s airline silverware.”

“Don’t matter what it is. You can’t bring knives through here.”

“Ma’am, that’s an airline knife. It’s the knife they give you on the plane.”

Posted on July 11, 2008 at 10:34 AM • View Comments

Hundreds of Thousands of Laptops Lost at U.S. Airports Annually

This is a weird statistic:

Some of the largest and medium-sized U.S. airports report close to 637,000 laptops lost each year, according to the Ponemon Institute survey released Monday. Laptops are most commonly lost at security checkpoints, according to the survey.

Close to 10,278 laptops are reported lost every week at 36 of the largest U.S. airports, and 65 percent of those laptops are not reclaimed, the survey said. Around 2,000 laptops are recorded lost at the medium-sized airports, and 69 percent are not reclaimed.

Travelers seem to lack confidence that they will recover lost laptops. About 77 percent of people surveyed said they had no hope of recovering a lost laptop at the airport, with 16 percent saying they wouldn’t do anything if they lost their laptop during business travel. About 53 percent said that laptops contain confidential company information, with 65 percent taking no steps to protect the information.

I don’t know how to generalize that to a total number of lost laptops in the U.S.; let’s call it 750,000. At $1,000 per laptop—a very conservative estimate—that’s $750 million in lost laptops annually. Most are lost at security checkpoints, and I’m sure the numbers went up considerably since those checkpoints got more annoying after 9/11.

There aren’t a lot of real numbers about the costs of increased airport security. We pay in time, in anxiety, in inconvenience. But we also pay in goods. TSA employees steal out of suitcases. And opportunists steal hundreds of millions of dollars of laptops annually.

EDITED TO ADD (7/14): Seems like this is not a story.

Posted on July 4, 2008 at 8:20 AM • View Comments

New TSA ID Requirement

The TSA has a new photo ID requirement:

Beginning Saturday, June 21, 2008 passengers that willfully refuse to provide identification at security checkpoint will be denied access to the secure area of airports. This change will apply exclusively to individuals that simply refuse to provide any identification or assist transportation security officers in ascertaining their identity.

This new procedure will not affect passengers that may have misplaced, lost or otherwise do not have ID but are cooperative with officers. Cooperative passengers without ID may be subjected to additional screening protocols, including enhanced physical screening, enhanced carry-on and/or checked baggage screening, interviews with behavior detection or law enforcement officers and other measures.

That’s right; people who refuse to show ID on principle will not be allowed to fly, but people who claim to have lost their ID will. I feel well-protected against terrorists who can’t lie.

I don’t think any further proof is needed that the ID requirement has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with control.

EDITED TO ADD (6/11): Daniel Solove comments.

Posted on June 11, 2008 at 1:42 PM • View Comments

Bus Defended Against Terrorists Who Want to Reenact the Movie Speed

We’re spending money on this?

…a new GPS device enables authorities to remotely control a bus—slowing it down to 5 mph and preventing it from restarting once it has stopped. The device has been installed on thousands of local commuter and tourist buses.

The technology is designed to prevent a terrorist from ramming a bus filled with people and explosives into buildings or tunnels.

Private bus companies have received millions of dollars from the Department of Homeland Security for the security systems. It costs $1,500 to equip each bus, with $50-per-bus monthly maintenance costs.

Gray Line double-decker tourist buses and Coach USA have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funds to install 3,000 devices. After receiving a $124,000 federal grant, DeCamp Bus Lines is installing the device on its 80 commuter buses, which travel routes from northern New Jersey to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown.

New Jersey Transit is currently in the process of equipping all of its roughly 3,000 buses with the technology. NJ Transit Chief of Police Joseph Bober said: “This enhanced technology helps us protect our bus drivers and customers. It’s another proactive tool to protect our property, employees and customers.”

Posted on June 10, 2008 at 12:31 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.