TSA Screening: A Half-Baked Pie
A couple of weeks ago, the Department of Homeland Security announced that TSA airport screeners failed to detect close to 95% of the explosives and weapons which undercover operatives were attempting to pass through security checkpoints.
The public’s image of TSA airport screeners in this latest test of airport security amounted to another embarrassment for the much-maligned agency. This issue is just a symptom of the real problem. In order to prevent actual threats from occurring, the TSA has to reduce the number of travelers it screens, and its employees have to quit undermining themselves and utilize the tools needed to accomplish their important mission.
In response to these numerous failures, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson removed acting TSA Administrator Melvin Carraway from his position. Johnson announced additional random covert testing, extra training for airport security personnel, and more random equipment checks.
The one thing that DHS and TSA should not do is rush to over-screen every single airline passenger. One of the worst things that could happen for airport security at this point is to reverse the progress made in TSA’s risk-based security (RBS) screening application.
Currently, TSA’s airport security procedures overweight the risk of items and underweights the risk of dangerous people because their security application still does not differentiate those passengers who may pose a threat from those who do not. Security should deal with a passenger’s intent more than banned items. Risk-based security applications can greatly assist in solving these issues, but only when employed effectively.
Most of us have heard of TSA’s PreCheck program. It allows U.S. citizens and permanent residents who agree to a fairly strict background check to receive expedited screening at U.S. airports for five years. TSA should look to look to expand this program
A completely counter-intuitive (but beneficial) argument is that TSA’s need for overall passenger screening will be lessened if the correct people — the good guys — are placed into PreCheck and the ones we don’t know anything about — maybe, the bad guys — will go through the normal screening process.
In turn, the total amount of screening procedures will decrease and the amount of technology needed will be less. It’s a simple, cost-effective and non-intrusive approach. Enrollment in TSA PreCheck database exceeded 1 million in March 2015, but it is only a small amount of the number of passengers who could be eligible for the program. It only makes sense that, the more people who are in the PreCheck system, the better it will operate.
PreCheck does have some growing pains, though. In late March, Kenneth Fletcher, TSA’s Chief Risk officer, reported to Congress that 13 of 17 recent recommendations to improve the PreCheck program by the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) were resolved but still open.
A significant issue is with the current background check procedures, personal travel history evidence, and fingerprint scans which TSA PreCheck applicants submit to. (Unfortunately, DHS policy makers cannot decipher between a low-risk and a high-risk passenger.) Fletcher further stated that TSA was working to address the OIG’s recommendations by collaborating with the DHS Office of Policy to establish a common definition for identifying ‘lower-risk’ travelers and low-risk ‘trusted’ travelers implementable across the department to enhance consistency in application across all DHS vetting programs.
Even with these issues, one can consider PreCheck a significant success. It has given birth to future programs like the Dynamic Aviation Risk Management Systems (DARMS), which incorporates incoming information on the fly — allowing TSA to quickly move screeners or resources where they are needed. In turn, DARMS creates various changing threat profiles of different people or places.
Unfortunately, greater numbers of passengers who are not in the program are being ushered into PreCheck lines by overworked screeners too eager to hurry the process along at the nation’s overcrowded airports. This should not be considered poor training for overburdened TSA employees, but bad policy implementation by TSA management.
This policy concept is called “managed inclusion,” where TSA uses this process to bring additional travelers into PreCheck lanes, based either on the results of Secure Flight checks prior to check-in, or at the discretion of actual TSA screeners while travelers are waiting in line at checkpoints depending on how busy the PreCheck lanes are relative to the regular screening lanes. This saves TSA and the passengers they serve a lot of time and money, but allowing screeners and passengers to take shortcuts undercuts the entire focus of the TSA risk-based security concept, which may be leading to under-screening of passengers.
Risk-based security concepts will work so long as one remains within their requirements. If TSA continues to move passengers into their programs who lack authentication showing they should be in the risk-based systems, then a misuse of the system beyond its security applications is occuring.
The problem with airport security extends beyond TSA. Currently, they represent the capabilities and limitations that plague this industry.
Advancement in technology developed a way to transport people around various destinations the world in a short period of time. In order to ensure they do not become victims of those who would use airplanes as instruments of terror, TSA must stay consistent with its RBS policies and procedures.
Misperceptions — and the haste to add cumbersome screening procedures for airline passengers — will make the system less safe than it already appears to be. RBS modeling of passengers represents an improvement, if we would let it get off the ground and let it develop.
Would you take a pie out of the oven fifteen minutes before it was done baking? What’s what TSA is doing here… If they keep cutting corners, it will be another half-baked idea.
This Scipio Securitas contribution was written by a career air transportation security official.
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