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The Rising TIDE Floods All Neighborhoods
By Art Kosatka - Wednesday May 15, 2013According to the most recent tally, the number of names in the government’s primary classified counter-terrorism data base has increased 62% in the past 5 years, from 540,000 to 875,000. That would be the "Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment" (TIDE) master database used by other agencies to create sub-catalogs of possible terrorists, including the infamous "no-fly" list. My first thought upon reading that was: that’s a lot of terrorists in my neighborhood – I should check those facts: http://www.nctc.gov/docs/Tide_Fact_Sheet.pdf . Alas, it’s apparently true; they’re everywhere. That’s 184 new names every da y for five years. The US Census Bureau says there are 3,143 counties in the United States, which... -
Weapons on Planes
By Art Kosatka - Wednesday April 17, 2013
To its credit, TSA continues to do its mandated job: finding weapons and other prohibited items at screening checkpoints throughout the country. The chart shows just one week of guns discovered during mid-March, and contrary to my own view that they might be concentrated in one region, they are pretty much everywhere. The same week yielded eight stun guns in carry-on and eight inert grenades in checked baggage. While I seriously doubt that any of the gun-bearers had grandiose visions of hijacking, the fact remains that weapons in carry-on are illegal, and in today’s security-intense environment, one would have to be pretty dense to claim they “forgot” they are packing heat on an airplane (the most typical excuse), or to do so... -
You Can't Make This Stuff Up
By Art Kosatka - Wednesday March 27, 2013I promised myself I would not join the fray on sequestration or the prohibited items list, but I can’t help myself when such stories take a left turn on the off-ramp to Strangeville. Let’s begin with a pop quiz: With sequestration causing huge budget cuts in every office of every Federal agency; FAA closing ATC towers, cutting essential air service to small markets, furloughing government employees one day per week - 20% of their income, and cancelling all White House tours to save the Secret Service a few bucks in overtime pay, what would you say is TSA’s latest contribution to cutting costs during the economic crisis? Good guess!! A $50 million one-year contract to buy TSA screeners new uniforms, announced 2 days before the... -
Let's Talk About RBS. And Pre-Check. And Opt-Out. Again.
By Art Kosatka - Wednesday February 13, 2013On the face of it, TSA’s Risk Based Security (RBS) seems like a pretty good idea: use your limited resources to address real identifiable risk, which in the physical security world is most often defined as threat-times-vulnerability. There are certainly plenty of airport vulnerabilities to go around, but the operative question is vulnerable to what? Defining the threat is always a fast-moving, fast-morphing target which is a continuing challenge for static policies and procedures using static technologies. Pre-check is a child of RBS: use the U.S.’ massive intelligence capabilities to check up on you, your family and friends, and if you’re not a terrorist threat, you get a quick once-over instead of the full screening... -
The Principle of Parsimony
By Art Kosatka - Wednesday January 16, 2013
I admit up front that we are often unjustifiably defined by a single questionable deed rather than our hundreds of intervening positive good deeds. Such is often the case with some TSA endeavors in the past, perhaps more so by those odd deeds encountered at the relatively uncontrolled outer edges of the system than in the belly of the beast at HQ. However, [you knew there’d be a “however”, didn’t you...] sometimes something strange originates at the core that just gives the folks in the field a head-scratching moment that’s hard to describe, much less make sense of. By now, we are all reasonably well-versed on the pleasures of TSA Pre-check, which allows pre-vetted persons the joy of a less stressful and more clothed trip...
