The news hit the media yesterday that Melvin Carraway, Acting Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration has been kicked to the curb after the system was “challenged” and had a 95 percent failure rate.
A massive, system-wide set of security breaches was discovered and in 70 tests, 67 pretend “terrorists” got through the crack cadre of TSA agents whose duty it is to protect our transportation system.
In the years since 2001; and many billions of dollars of waste later, I fear the only thing standing between the safety of flying and the chaos of terrorism is the basic decency and goodwill of my fellow Americans.
We are a sea of basically good-hearted, reasonable human beings who are reduced to being x-rayed, touched, probed and examined by thousands of agents who are looking for things they almost never find because those things are almost never there. When they are there (whatever they are), they are almost always there by accident.
I know the former Administrator, Mr. Carraway, is being targeted for the failures of the system but I would submit it is the system itself that is the failure of the system. After billions of dollars, TSA is still using 1950s technology to process those 632 million air travelers. It cannot be done.
Air travelers are putting up with more than enough. It is time the process; the technology itself changes; not a 97 year-old great-grandmother in a wheelchair who must change or the 2 year-old kid screaming through what passes for security who must change or the angry and fed-up business traveler who must endure being reduced to a non-entity over and over again.
TSA is also an ethical failure
At this stage I would have to ask just what, exactly, should any traveler do in addition to what he or she is doing? In fact, I would submit we should all be doing less. We should not have to remove our laptops, we should not have to take off our shoes, our belts, our jackets or even our hats. No one should be touching our bodies. We are not prisoners, we have committed no crimes; we are just common everyday people trying to get from one point to another.
Nor should Carraway have been fired. He did nothing wrong. I cannot stand the screening process; though it turns my stomach, I cannot blame anyone in the system.
The failure is the technology. It is the weak point in the entire process. Given the massive amounts of money being spent, why has the technology itself become so stagnant?
I am clearly not the first person to say this but why does the current technology focus so much on objects and not on people? Why can’t the system be oriented to first identify suspected terrorists and then look for objects that a suspected terrorist might carry? Has our society become so politicized and politically correct that we cannot identify those with connections to terror? Yes, I am including domestic as well as foreign threats.
Can we possibly screen passengers in groups rather than individually? I know it is a radical thought, but could it be done? With technology such as drones and robotics are relying too much on people and not on devices with lower margins for error?
Should or could the screening process be started earlier, such as in our homes or offices? In our vehicles or on public transportation going to the airports?
Do these ideas all sound silly or do they sound silly because so little thought has been given to the process?
95 percent is an awful lot
We know the system does not have a failure rate of 95 percent. It is infinitely less. The testing was done using weaponry and explosives in “hidden places.” Hidden places would imply human error, but again, isn’t this a failure of technology? If a terrorist has a cleverly concealed weapon, it is concealed in a way that another person cannot find it; so why aren’t we relying on technology – not another person to find it?
I cannot believe with the massive engineering and scientific knowledge in this country that new, rapid technologies could not be developed. My goodness, whole teams of scientists and engineers could be put on this problem.
However, there is one problem within the problem: 50,000. That is the approximate number of agents and marshals within the TSA behemoth. The guys who pat us down make from around $30,000 to $45,000 annually and supervisors make up to $175,000 and that sure as heck doesn’t include benefits. The TSA has become its own bureaucracy. I would hate to believe the factor preventing TSA from being more efficient, is TSA itself.
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