Far too often I agonize over this column, not from a shortage of security-related material, but a multi-plethora of choices, if there is such a thing. This is one of those times. Congress is issuing reports[1] and holding hearings on what they told TSA it should have been doing if it had just listened (just 60 days before elections); the Rand Corporation has published a pretty good 183-page analytical report[2] on aviation security efficiency, risks, cost-benefit analysis, consequences, and tradeoffs, but not much in the way of real solutions; and TSA has marshaled a massive public relations blitz trumpeting all its good deeds by inventing Pre-Check and “risk-based security”. All this notwithstanding a Frequent Business Traveler survey[3] in which 90.8% of respondents were “not pleased” with TSA, and dozens of stories on such travesties as denied boarding of an autistic child as a ”security risk” or a TSA agent admitting to detaining a passenger because he “doesn’t like her attitude” (video on YouTube[4]).
So in this brief space, rather than try to mine the good parts out of about 240 pages of reports, from which you may savor the fullness of their wisdom by downloading them at the links below, I’d like to address the “new” TSA notion of risk-based security by sharing a reflection of a retired colleague from our former FAA security days, Courtney Tucker of the Civil Aviation Security Policy and Planning Office:
I have always been amused by the “discovery” of “risk-based” security measures and screening by those sitting on the sidelines. We have been using risk-based assessments since at least 1986. FAA/TSA depends upon others to provide the intelligence information to craft security measures that respond to the threat and mitigate vulnerabilities. As for behavioral detection or “profiling”, recall the following from a 1969 FAA report: Eastern Air Lines voluntarily agreed to an FAA test of an “operational screening system for boarding airline passengers” with “weapon-detection devices” used in conjunction with “FAA’s evolving psychological profile to identify and isolate suspicious individuals for further surveillance or search.” Eastern was joined later in that year by TWA, Pan Am, and Continental in “using the screening system.” The sharing of the costs of passenger screening was then and has continued to be a topic of debate. A solution found in 1972 was to require air carriers to provide screening personnel and airport operators to provide law enforcement support.” TSA has come to their revelation 43 years late.
This is also relevant to those of us who watched the 9/11 tragedy unfold from the FAA security operations room. When TSA was formed, we clearly recall the bureaucratic efforts to begin again from scratch, because “it happened on the FAA’s watch, so it was the fault of the FAA system.” After nearly 2 months of intense negotiations to restructure everything from a zero baseline, the resulting TSA plan mirrored the existing FAA system more than 90%-plus, with the principal differences lying not in policies and procedures, but in the shifting of the legal requirements to a different part of the Code of Federal Regulations and the addition of a few transitional security measures dealing with what little was known of the attacks at the time. Only in the past few weeks has it become publicly known that the intelligence community had very specific information on the attacks as early as May/June 2001, but the Pentagon downgraded any action plans as premature.
The lesson(s): listen to (and increase the budget for) the intelligence community; that’s where the “risk-based” pre-event information has come from since Napoleonic times; and (b) listen to the people with 43 years of experience on the front lines; there’s often a very big difference between theory and practice.
[1] http://homeland.house.gov/hearing/subcommittee-hearing-eleven-years-after-911-can-tsa-evolve-meet-next-terrorist-threat
[2] www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2012/RAND_MG1220.pdf.
[3] http://www.frequentbusinesstraveler.com/2012/09/tsa-poll/
