There are two lines of defense against terrorists trying to smuggle weapons on planes: (1) the identity checks like the no fly list and (2) the physical checks like the metal detectors. We’ve described before how even a 10 year old can forge a valid boarding pass with a fake name to get around the no fly list and use a second boarding pass with his real name to get to the plane (more on that below). That means that only the physical security checks stand between an armed terrorist and a plane full of civilians. How’s that going:
Security screeners at two of the nation’s busiest airports failed to find fake bombs hidden on undercover agents posing as passengers in more than 60% of tests last year, according to a classified report obtained by USA TODAY. Screeners at Los Angeles International Airport missed about 75% of simulated explosives and bomb parts that Transportation Security Administration testers hid under their clothes or in carry-on bags at checkpoints, the TSA report shows… The failure rates at Los Angeles and Chicago stunned security experts.
That part about being stunned has to be a lie. At Newark last year screeners failed to catch hidden weapons 20 out of 22 times. You can’t imagine the sheer, wallowing idiocy of some of the TSA employees. It’s utterly mind boggling. It’s not just that they’re really bad at their jobs, although of course they are. They’re also just bad at life. Petulant and officious, they embody all the worst elements of every petty bureaucrat. These are often careless and not very bright people with unlimited authority over the travelers that they seethingly resent. It’s almost as if LAX’s hiring protocol is run by people more interested in giving jobs to friends and family than in facing the challenges presented by terrorism.
We’ve been sitting on this story for 3 weeks because we wanted the person to be back in the country before we blogged it. A friend of ours took an international flight starting at LAX and going through JFK. She checks in, everything is fine. The boarding pass is slipped into one of those envelopes where you can only see the stub with your seat assignment.
Our friend goes through two screening checks where they compare her to her ID to her boarding pass. At the terminal, she hands the boarding pass to the woman checking in passengers. When the boarding pass is run under the barcode reader, an alarm goes off that shows that our friend has already boarded the plane. No worries – they waved her through anyway.
Our friend is now on the plane, except there’s a woman is sitting in her assigned seat. Only then does everyone realize that she’s been using someone else’s boarding pass. Specifically, she’s been using the pass of the woman who is in “her” seat – who has been checked into the system twice. This apparently does not trigger alarms, even though it should be a red flag that the identity-check part of airport security may have been compromised.
So TSA doesn’t know who’s getting on airplanes and they allow bombs to slip through 75% of the time. But we can’t bring a half-finished liter of Diet Pepsi through security, because that might be dangerous. [Photo]
References:
* Q: Could Airport Security Suck Worse? [MR]
* Most fake bombs missed by screeners [USA Today]
Previously:
* TSA Web Site Hacked and Hijacked. Of Course It Was.
* HuffPo Blogger: Replace TSA With Blackwater Ops
* It’s Time For Another Rant About the TSA – Hardline On 1oz Pepsi, Not So Much On Boxcutters [Video]
