TSA ten years after

posted at 12:07 pm on September 10, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Homeland Security ]   

As part of the tenth-anniversary observance of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the National Museum of American History in Washington is featuring a temporary exhibit comprised of artifacts retrieved from the rubble at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. One of the visitors to the exhibit, NPR reports, was overheard commenting that 9/11 changed “everything for what we know as the American way of life, especially when it comes to travel.”

That visitor knows a thing or two about travel. He is John Pistole, Administrator of the Transportation and Security Administration, which was created two months after the 9/11 attacks. On Pistole’s watch, the tactics of TSA agents have become more invasive and Draconian. Their heavy-handed pat-downs alone have spawned dozens of lawsuits and become the topic of vigorous debate.

For many, the debate is resolved. Another man who knows a thing or two about travel is Rafi Ron, former head of security at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport and currently a consultant in the U.S. He is quoted in the NPR piece as saying:

What we have been and are still doing at the checkpoints is not necessarily providing us the level of security that is needed, and there is more that needs to be done.

Obviously, one of those things that needs to be done is to train screeners better: The current crop of TSA personnel has failed far too often to intercept real threats while embarrassing themselves by vigorously pursuing non-threats.

Another is to better screen the screeners. It was recently revealed that one former agent had a stash of 2,000 kiddie porn photos and videos on his home computer and an external hard drive. That man, Andrew Cheever, now faces federal charges. His apprehension is cold comfort to the thousands of parents who subject their young children to pat-downs by strangers at airports each year, any one of whom could be another  Andrew Cheever.

To its credit, the TSA recently implemented a program modeled on Israeli-style “behavioral profiling,” where agents are trained to look for “micro expressions” of malicious intent such as lack of eye contact. However, the training is limited to four days of classroom work and 24 hours of on-the-job experience. Let’s just hope that future terrorists are no brighter than the agents meant to spot them.

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