Checkpoint failures have fliers wondering about their safety
THE WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON — Last week, agents at U.S. airport security checkpoints intercepted 45 guns, an assortment of knives and brass knuckles, and several deactivated hand grenades. Two weeks ago, the count was 53, and the week before that, it was 57.
But if you’ve ever tried to slip through with a bottle of water, well, you probably got caught.
This week, the acting head of the Transportation Security Administration got bounced from his job because in 95 percent of test cases, real guns or fake bombs made it past the TSA.
That left some travelers asking whether it’s safe to fly and others wondering whether security measures they often find strict and intrusive are as lax as those test results suggest.
“The bottom line remains that it’s just completely unacceptable to have such a high failure rate,” said John Pistole, who led the TSA for four years before resigning six months ago to become president of Anderson University in Indiana.
The undercover testing was done by agents dispatched by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, John Roth. They reportedly outwitted TSA checkpoint officers 67 out of 70 times this year, passing through with undetected weapons and phony explosives.
Little else is known about how, where or when the tests were conducted. Alarmed by the findings, Roth rushed them to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. The results won’t be compiled into a written report for another month and, given that they expose vulnerabilities in the system, the document isn’t likely to be formally released.
Pistole came to Washington to discuss the matter with Roth and Johnson. Although he declined to describe its specifics, he did provide context for interpreting the information.
Without excusing the failures, Pistole said that members of the inspector general’s “Red Teams” sent out to do the testing have several advantages that wouldbe terrorists, in particular, and pistolpacking passengers do not. Because he didn’t have the specifics of the 70 tests, Pistole talked in general about Red Team tactics.
“They have the benefit of knowing what the (TSA) detection capabilities are — literally the specifications on each type of machine they’re trying to test,” he said. “They know what the (TSA’s standard operating procedures) are. They know what the training is for the