Don’t ground Quiet Skies program
Airport screeners are always searching for “stuff ” — shampoos, sodas and, most recently, snacks — in your carryon bags. As the list of banned and restricted items has grown, the Transportation Security Administration has been derided for “security theater” and urged to focus instead on finding people who may be threats to aviation.
But now, when the TSA is trying to do just that, critics are in an uproar over its “Quiet Skies” program, in which air marshals closely monitor passengers tagged as potential threats.
Quiet Skies, a confidential initiative first reported by The Boston Globe, seems consistent with an effort to identify dangerous people in a sea of more than 2 million travelers a day.
Friday’s bizarre incident at Seattle's main airport — in which a 29-year-old Horizon Air employee stole and crashed a 76-seat plane — highlighted the need not just to fill security gaps but also to take a more people-oriented approach to protecting commercial aviation.
In a meeting last week with USA TODAY’s Editorial Board, TSA Administrator David Pekoske defended Quiet Skies and said that “ordinary citizens” have no need to worry about it.
Now that the program has been exposed, TSA has an obligation to prove that. And strong oversight will be needed to ensure that this initiative doesn’t become a form of discrimination.
According to TSA and internal documents, Quiet Skies is designed to find “unknown” potential terrorists not on the government’s watchlists. Passengers entering the country are screened with the use of an algorithm that looks at such things as travel patterns, associations and current intelligence. Homeland Security Department analysts and lawyers then narrow the list.
Since March, a new layer has been added. Air marshals are assigned to ob- serve certain passengers — people not suspected of any crime — on planes and look for indicators of risk, including fidgeting or sweating excessively or changing appearance in airline bathrooms, according to a list revealed by The Globe.
Critics have been virulent. The Council on American-Islamic Relations sued federal officials over watchlisting and Quiet Skies. And the head of the Air Marshal Association said marshals could be put to better use.
That’s questionable. Deploying air marshals to monitor subjects was the TSA’s response to government watchdog critiques that marshals weren’t being used effectively.
After congressional staffs were briefed, some appeared ready to give the program a chance. “This looks like a good plan on paper, but we’re not ready to declare victory yet,” said a spokesman for Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation.
That sounds about right. Oversight is needed, but surveilling suspicious people, rather than snacks and shoes, seems like a smarter way to make air travel more secure.
And, as Friday night’s episode at Seattle–Tacoma International Airport shows, the dangerous people aren’t always the passengers.