Post-9/11 airport overhaul a dud, experts say
Billions of dollars later, jury’s still out on whether it’s any safer to fly in the U.S.
WASHINGTON— The fake terrorists had to take off their sneakers before they sauntered through airport security with guns and mock bombs.
The acting chief of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration was demoted last week over the latest in a long-running series of embarrassments: undercover government auditors managed to get banned weapons through screening in 67 of 70 recent tests. The man nominated to replace him was asked Wednesday if it is safe to fly.
“I want to be able to say, yes, it is safe to do so,” Coast Guard Vice-Admiral Peter Neffenger told a Senate committee. “I don’t know if it is right now.”
Government-deployed fake terrorists have inside knowledge real terrorists don’t. But their consistent success in avoiding detection has members of Congress asking a favourite question of travellers who have been forced to surrender bottles of shampoo: Have all the changes at U.S. airports in the 14 years since Sept. 11, 2001, and all the billions of dollars spent on them, achieved anything significant at all?
“No,” says Douglas Laird, president of aviation security consulting firm Laird and Associates.
“We’ve spent money. We’ve wasted time annoying people,” says Bruce Schneier, a security expert and acerbic critic of the Transportation Security Administration. He coined the phrase now widely used to describe tough-looking but useless airport rit- uals: “security theatre.”
The TSA was created after 9/11 to take over airport screening from private contractors. Its most obvious vulnerability — sleepy screeners, eyes glazed over from the tedium — is only part of a top-to-bottom litany of personnel and policy problems. In May, Homeland Security inspector general John Roth said the agency had spent billions on technology that produced “no” improvements.
“The real issue, in my opinion, is we don’t give them the tools we need,” says Laird. “What we really need is a lot more money spent on research and development to come up with the technology that approaches 100per-cent probability of detection. We’re nowhere near that for hand- carried items.”
Another expert, Jeffrey Price, says the screening system needs an “overhaul” — including, notably, the use of threat-detecting dogs.
“They’re very effective in numerous ways,” says Price, the author of an aviation security textbook. “One, they can actually detect explosives, and we know that. We know they’re effective, we know they’re highly trained, everybody believes in them.”
The TSA’s overseers have found errors even with the way the agency has deployed a small number of dogs so far. Short of mass strip-searches, Schneier argues, there is no security fix to be found.
The only way to catch sophisticated terrorists, he says, is through intelligence and investigation. He says the government should cut the TSA’s budget — now up to $7 billion — and roll back security at the airport itself to pre-9/11 levels.
Sophisticated terrorists, Schneier says, are simply not trying to sneak weapons past airport security. How do we know? If they were trying, he says, they would be succeeding, because we know airport security is terrible. “We could spend an enormous more amount of money on airport security,” he says. “And instead of missing 95 per cent of the non-existent guns and bombs, we miss 20. A huge improvement.”