TSA Sickouts Continue, Same as Before

As the Partial Government Shutdown of 2018-2019 extends past the first missed payday, there is lots of press attention being paid to TSA airport screeners calling in sick to protest (TSA Sickouts Worsen Daily), and some speculation that the screeners might quit en masse.

To which I say, what's new about that? Not much. It's the same old situation as before anyone missed a paycheck:

The Transportation Security Administration is a revolving door for more than 8,000 screeners at 10 of the busiest airports in the U.S., data obtained by Bloomberg Law suggest.

The TSA hired nearly as many agents at some sites as left their jobs between 2012 to 2016, according to information provided by the agency in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. The TSA doesn’t separate the data by why an employee left, so the numbers include those who quit, were fired, or retired.

-- snip --

The TSA employs a total of about 11,700 screeners at the 10 airports. The turnover rate across those sites ranged from 30 percent to more than 80 percent over the five years analyzed. Turnover among federal employees overall has hovered around 15 percent during the past three years, Hausknecht said.

Being an airport screener is just a terrible job, and high turnover is inevitable.

Will the churn of TSA personnel get even greater now that they have missed a paycheck - or, more accurately, have had their pay delayed until the shutdown is over? Maybe. And if so, will that make airport screening even slower and more erratic than it is already? Yes, probably. And finally, is there anything that can be done to resolve the Partial Government Shutdown of 2018-2019 anytime soon? No, not really.

One can only feel sympathy for those unpaid screeners. But I wonder if any of that sympathy will continue after the shutdown is over.

Pakistani Visitors Receive a Cultural Experience, TSA-Style

The New York Times is reporting tonight on a fiasco of a cultural exchange visit to the U.S. by a group of Pakistani parliamentarians (Upset by U.S. Security, Pakistanis Return as Heroes):

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A tour of the United States arranged by the State Department to improve ties to Pakistani legislators ended in a public relations fiasco when the members of the group refused to submit to extra airport screening in Washington, and they are now being hailed as heroes on their return home.

“People should be thankful, you made them so proud,” said Hamid Mir, the host of a popular national talk show, during an interview in his studio on Tuesday with four of the six politicians, who railed against the security precautions at Ronald Reagan National Airport.

Meetings with the Obama administration’s top policy makers on Pakistan, including the president’s special representative, Richard C. Holbrooke, and visits to the Pentagon and the National Security Council, did not allay the anger the politicians said they felt at being asked to submit to a secondary screening on Sunday before boarding a flight to New Orleans. They declined to be screened and did not board the flight.

Pakistan is one of 14 mostly Muslim countries whose citizens must go through increased checks before they fly into the United States, a procedure mandated by the Obama administration in the wake of the failed attempt by a Nigerian man to blow up an airliner flying from the Netherlands to Detroit on Dec. 25.

The inclusion of Pakistan on the list was broadly criticized as an insult to a country that the United States calls an ally.

The leader of the parliamentary group, Senator Abbas Khan Afridi, said in an interview on Tuesday that before they were to board the flight for New Orleans, he and his colleagues were selected from a crowd of passengers at the airport and asked to stand aside.

They were then asked to accept a full-body scan by a machine, he said. Such body-scanning units are in use at 19 airports across the United States, and more are being installed.

One of Mr. Afridi’s colleagues, Akhunzada Chitan, told Mr. Mir on his “Capital Talk” program, “Going through a body scan makes you naked, and in making you naked, they make the whole country naked.”

The lawmakers were chosen to visit the United States by the Political Section of the American Embassy. American officials are eager to reach out to political figures from the underdeveloped and isolated tribal areas where the Pakistani Army is now fighting to reclaim territory from the Taliban.

The United States Agency for International Development pledged two years ago to spend $750 million on various projects in the tribal areas, but residents there complain that they see more of the Taliban than American assistance.

In preparatory briefings for their trip, the politicians were advised that they might have to submit to extra body searches, just as randomly selected Americans must submit to secondary screening by the new machines, two officials from the American Embassy said.

The Pakistanis were specifically warned that the United States was not a “V.I.P. culture,” unlike Pakistan, where politicians are often exempted from unpalatable procedures that other people have to tolerate, the American officials said.

“We are disappointed that the group took offense at the security procedures thousands of Americans and visitors must endure at airports every day,” said Larry Schwartz, the senior communications adviser at the American Embassy in Islamabad.

“No offense was intended. Indeed, they were warmly welcomed at high levels in Washington.”

The American Embassy in Islamabad has been endowed with an extra $37 million by Congress to spend on exchange programs intended to show skeptical Pakistanis that the United States is a real ally, a country that wants to help, not hinder, Pakistan.

The people-to-people exchanges between Pakistan and the United States, which include American lecturers and teachers of English coming to Pakistan, is now the most ambitious of such efforts run by the State Department around the globe, Mr. Schwartz said.

About 2,000 Pakistanis are expected to participate in the strengthened educational and cultural programs this year, he said. Indeed, a prime motivation of the protest against the screening procedures by the tribal area politicians appeared to be an effort to appeal to their home constituencies, many of whom regard the United States as an enemy.

“Our people were very disturbed we were going to America,” Mr. Afridi said. “We were under threat for going to the United States. We took the risk to see if America was interested in solving the problems.”

It isn't clear from this report whether the Pakistanis absolutely, positively, refused to go through a body scanner, or whether they were reacting to a little bad attitude from a TSA Inspector. (What? A TSA Inspector getting officious? Hard to believe, I know.) Or was it a case of foreign VIP presumption meeting homegrown TSA intransigence? Either way, things will not end happily.

The Aviation Security Crisis Continues

The first week of the new decade is only two days old and already we've had the following security alerts and emergencies.

If you put up a fight, you won't make your flight

Award winning war correspondent Michael Yon was detained and handcuffed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport Yesterday by Transportation Security Administration (TSA) personnel.

According to Yon, “they handcuffed me for failing to cooperate. They said I was impeding their ability to do their job.”

Regarding the incident in Seattle, Yon was adamant the TSA agents had overstepped their bounds: “If I am the guy on that passport and I don’t have any contraband in my luggage, it is a matter for the FBI, not the TSA ... TSA people are out of control.”

And people say that German police don't have a sense of humor

A German man was temporarily detained at Stuttgart airport on Tuesday after he repeatedly told security personnel that he had explosives in his underwear, police said.

The police said in a statement that the family would not be refunded for the cost of their canceled trip and could "expect a fine of up to 1,000 euros ($1,444) ... and possible costs for the police operation."

Letting TSA screeners use their own discretion is never a good idea

On a post-Christmas flight out of New Orleans last week, the TSA confiscated young Josh Pitney’s Play-Doh.

The child’s mother Christy Pitney [said] "And the man from TSA was taking every [Play-Doh] can out at a time and putting it on a table, and Josh saw and he started fussing. I tried to explain that those were the rules, but it turns out it’s not prohibited on the TSA’s website - so apparently those are not the rules."

Christy was right. Play-Doh is not a prohibited item and it is allowed on board ... However, because plastic explosives can be camouflaged to look like Play-Doh, a TSA spokeswoman says screeners are told to use their own discretion.

Bad dog!

All checkpoints at the Lindbergh Terminal of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport have reopened after being closed for a short time, after a suspicious piece of luggage was found by a bomb-sniffing dog, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

The TSA reported that at about 1:45 p.m., a canine team was conducting routine screening of operations at MSP when they were alerted on a bag on a luggage carousel number 12. TSA contacted the local police department and Bloomington Police Department bomb squad.

The bag was not a passenger's bag and was never on a flight, according to airport spokesperson Pat Hogan. It was the end bag the airport crews throw on the carousel to signal that all luggage is unloaded.

Suspicious honey, and possibly toxic

Authorities say the suspicious material inside luggage that prompted the shutdown of the Bakersfield airport turns out to be five soft drink bottles filled with honey.

Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood says the bottles, inside a checked bag at Meadows Field, had tested positive for traces of an explosive.

Youngblood says investigators are trying to determine whether there was something in the honey or on the bag that caused security alarms to go off shortly before 7:30 a.m. Tuesday.

The discovery of the suspicious material halted flights to and from the airport. Two security officers reported feeling ill after being exposed to the bottles.

Security test goes wrong

Irish police have released a man held over an explosives find, after Slovak authorities admitted planting them in his luggage as part of a security test.

Airport security detected seven of the illicit items, but the eighth - 90g of research development explosive - managed to escape detection.

Slovak authorities were reportedly trying to test screening procedures for checked-in luggage by placing items with unwitting passengers.

Heavy sleeper missed by sleepy TSA agents

The Pensacola Gulf Coast Regional Airport is investigating how a Pensacola Christian College student from Korea ended up spending the night at the airport undetected.

The student, Enoch Hwang, was found asleep at a Delta airlines gate at 4:15 a.m. Sunday when an agent of the airline arrived to open the gate for business.

According to an incident report, Hwang told airport officials, in broken English, that he arrived at the airport on a Delta flight at about 5 p.m. Saturday ... He spent the night sleeping in the seats near Gate 8 next to the concourse window and next to a support column.

According to the report, Transportation Safety Administration officials left the concourse at 7 p.m. Saturday and two TSA employees walked to the end of the concourse and back to the checkpoint without noticing Hwang ... Another search was conducted at 11:50 p.m. Saturday by airport police and they did not spot Hwang either ... A search done at 3:10 a.m. Sunday morning did not uncover Hwang.

And your point is?

Cuba has lodged a protest with the top US diplomat on the island over extra screening for Cuban citizens flying into the US, calling the rule a "hostile action" meant to justify America's trade embargo.

Josefina Vidal Ferreiro, director of the Cuban Foreign Ministry's North American affairs office, said the new security controls were "discriminatory and selective."

TSA = Touching Sensitive Areas

Security for international travel is being ramped up this week. Just yesterday, Senator John Kerry was denied a visa to visit Iran, and a suspicious traveler bearing a passport that identified her as "Joan Rosenberg AKA Joan Rivers" was detected and turned away by an alert airline gate agent in Costa Rica.

Of more importance to me personally was the decision by TSA to require enhanced screening for U.S.-bound travelers coming from 14 particular countries:

The Transportation Security Administration announced Sunday that it will begin enhanced screening procedures Monday on any U.S.-bound air passenger traveling through "state sponsors of terrorism or other countries of interest" such as Pakistan, Yemen and Nigeria.

The TSA said in a statement announcing the new measures that "effective aviation security must begin beyond our borders."

A senior government official, not authorized to speak on the record, provided CNN with the full list of 14 countries that fall under the TSA's "countries of interest" label -- which will automatically trigger the enhanced screening.

[They are the terrorist sponsoring states of] Cuba, Sudan, Syria and Iran [plus] Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen, the government official said.

I've been to eight of the 14 countries of interest, and have every prospect of going back to some of them in 2010, so before long I'll be body-scanned and given an "enhanced pat-down" (which means a pat-down that touches "sensitive" areas of the body) on my return travel. That will be an unpleasant experience, but I wouldn't mind it if I thought it would make air travel more secure. But will it really?

Supposedly, body scanners and enhanced pat-downs will "better enable [TSA] officers to identify and detect hidden items in the most sensitive areas of the body," such as Abdulmutallab's weaponized BVDs (photo here). The problem is that any search intrusive enough to discover objects hidden in the most sensitive areas of the body is too intrusive to be acceptable to the traveling public, especially the litigious American traveling public. And any search not intrusive enough to discover something in or near a body cavity would not have discovered the kind of explosive devices that Abdulmutallab and others have attempted to use. The problem has a name: "the tampon paradox."

TSA tried enhanced pat-downs for secondary inspections after 9/11, and the resulting tsunami of protests and law suits forced them to go back to regular pat-downs, which do not involve the breast and groin areas. I predict the same thing will happen again when body scanners are put into general use at U.S. airports, only even faster.

A failure of enhanced screening could end up being a good thing. There has been a pattern to aviation security measures that looks like a dialectic process: every spectacular terrorist incident has been followed by an immediate and ill-considered overreaction by TSA or its predecessor agencies; that overreaction sooner or later became unsustainable and collapsed; finally, a consensus formed around a reduced, but greater than original, level of traveler inconvenience.

At least one time, that pattern resulted in a really good idea. After the bombing of Pan Am 103 in 1988, a great deal of money and effort went into an effort to develop a 100% effective technology for detecting explosives in checked luggage. Eventually, the big brains admitted that there was no 100% effective technical means to do that, however, it also occurred to them that there didn't really have to be one. A better approach was to determine the smallest amount of explosives that could reliably be detected with existing technology (x-grams of plastic explosive, for example), acknowledge the fact that amounts up to x-grams might be inside screened luggage, and then put screened luggage inside cargo containers that had been harden to resist the effects of explosive devices up to x-grams. This is called the design basis threat approach to risk management, and the Federal Aviation Administration employed it in the 1990s to develop blast-hardened cargo containers as a reasonable solution to the exploding luggage problem.

With any luck, eventually we'll see that pattern repeated in response to the threat of person-borne improvised explosive devices inside commercial aircraft. TSA ought to admit to itself that such devices, whether carried externally or internally, are not detectable with 100% reliability. Then it should pick a charge weight that represents its best guess at the largest amount of explosive which could get through the most intrusive traveler search that we are actually willing to perform (x-grams). And then harden any vulnerable points on the aircraft that could readily be accessed by a passenger and where x-grams of explosive would be enough to do catastrophic damage.

That approach would reduce the problem to an engineering matter, at which point realistic solutions might be achievable. Perhaps airline cabins would have to be redesigned to eliminate some seats (like the one where Abdulmutallab was seated) that are too close to the fuel tanks or wings, or to place protective panels over the cabin walls and windows so as to get a critical few inches of stand-off distance between the skin of the airframe and the postulated explosive threat. Even if vulnerable points couldn't be eliminated entirely, they could be reduced to a level that is the optimum trade-off between blast resistance and airline economics.

No security solution will be perfect, but I would call that one an improvement over the situation we have now, where millions of passengers will be patted-down enough to annoy them but not enough to eliminate the threat.

A 2010 Prediction: Virtual Strip Searches For Air Travelers

Thanks to Umar Farouk 'the panty bomber' Abdulmutallab, it's a safe prediction that in 2010 air travelers will find themselves going through what the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) calls "Advanced Imaging Technology" and the American Civil Liberties Union calls a "virtual strip search."

Specifically, we will be going through the Rapiscan Secure 1000 'Single Pose' device. TSA has issued the manufacturer a sole source contract to supply 150 of the devices right away at $167,000 each, and 300 more in 2010. There are 40 Secure 1000 machines currently in use at 19 U.S. airports, mostly for secondary screening and pilot projects.

A total of 490 machines will barely scratch the surface, even if TSA forgets about domestic flights and only tries to screen U.S.-bound travelers departing from overseas airports. There are 58 million air passengers arriving in the U.S. from overseas each year, and about 250 flights on any day. Two body scan devices would be needed to screen the passengers on each typical long-range aircraft since the average throughput time for a body scanner is probably around 30 seconds per person, which means that it would take two and a half hours to screen an Airbus-load of passengers with just a single machine, and that is surely too long for normal airport operations. So, plan on two scanners at each overseas gate that handles U.S.-bound traffic. And if TSA intends to screen domestic U.S. air travelers as well, I can't count high enough to figure out how many scanners we would need for the 600 or so domestic airports that are certified to handle commercial air carriers. Dulles International Airport has 143 gates just by itself.

That's a lot of orders for Rapiscan and its competitors. Here's an interview conducted yesterday on CNBC about the business of whole body scanners:









This backscatter image technology is not new. In fact, it has been in use for certain limited security applications, such as screening prisoners, since the late 1980s. It works well; that is, it reliably produces a skin-level image that will allow an operator to detect the presence of objects concealed under the passenger's clothes. It does not work perfectly; that is, it does not detect objects that are concealed under the skin, or inside body orifices, or out of sight within anatomical nooks and crannies. The 'single pose' machines will scan the front and back of a subject simultaneously, which is a pretty complete scan provided that the subject keeps his arms raised. The second-generation devices will do an even better 360-degree scan since they will be able to get images as subjects are turning. These machines do not get a particularly good view of the crotch area, however, and that's where the bombs are these days. Still, they work better than any other non-intrusive search technology that I'm aware of.

Only privacy objections have kept the things from gaining enough public acceptance to be put into widespread use for passenger screening before now (plus, in the UK, an interesting legal argument that imaging the bodies of passengers under the age of 18 could violate child protection laws). They have so far been limited to secondary screening or voluntary applications. But, it looks like the Christmas bomb attack on Northwest Flight 253 could well be the last straw that breaks the public's opposition to their use.

As much as I detest 'security theater' and the Kabuki dance we already do at airports, I'm ready to surrender and be scanned. Given the choice between a 'virtual strip search' and a manual pat-down, I'll gladly opt for the scan.