Three days ago, a security violation in Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey caused the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to shut down the terminal for more than six hours, causing widespread delays while they searched for the man who breached a secure area. TSA checked their video system to get a look at the man, and discovered that not only was their system not recording, it wasn’t operating at all. No one at TSA knew how to get in touch with their fallback partners at Continental, either, as CBS News reports this morning:
The sign at the Transportation Security Administration screening post at Newark read: “Premises Under Constant Video Surveillance.”
What is should add is: “If We’re Lucky.”
That’s because CBS 2 has learned that when an unidentified man breached a secure area at Newark on Sunday night, delaying thousands of passengers for hours, the TSA cameras weren’t working.
That’s right – they weren’t even recording, sources said, and needed a reboot, which the agency apparently didn’t ask for. That set off a chain reaction of even more missteps that caused needless chaos and inconvenience for several thousand hapless passengers.
With the cameras inoperable, the TSA tried to get a second set of surveillance video from Continental Airlines. But the TSA apparently didn’t know the correct telephone number and the specific procedures to get the footage. That caused a two hour delay in identifying the intruder and closing the airport to look for him.
When they finally got the footage, they couldn’t find the intruder, discovering later that he had slipped out another entrance 20 minutes after he arrived.
The revelation sufficiently angered Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) enough to demand hearings into TSA’s performance. “This system was broken,” he told CBS, and he didn’t mean the cameras. In an arena where the US cannot afford even one mistake, the incompetence displayed at Newark is disturbing — and remarkable for an agency with enough years under its belt to have known better.
Isn’t someone supposed to be checking those cameras? In my previous career, I worked with retailers on security issues and know that they take their surveillance systems very seriously — and the higher risk retailers especially so. They build routines for managers to verify recordings, test the cameras, and in the last few years have them networked back to home offices for regular review. When a system breaks, repairs are demanded ASAP. And that’s just for retail stores.
In a retail store, a camera failure could cost the owner a few thousand dollars in shrinkage. In this case, the cost of the delays in Newark and around the country for a six-hour shutdown will run into the millions.
TSA imposes a lot of demands on air travelers, some reasonable, some less so. We put up with them because we believe that the trade-off is secure flying and competent enforcement by TSA. If they can’t even keep a critical CCTV system turned on and recording, that tends to make airport security look like a highly expensive and intrusive illusion.
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