The TSA and Airline Security

While blame for the recent terrorism snafu on Northwest flight 253 to Detroit has been spread fairly broadly, one government agency has become a particular target of concern and complaint, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

And perhaps unfairly in this case. The bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, boarded a flight first from Lagos to Amesterdam and from thence to Detroit. Of course in Amsterdam the TSA's eternally-wearied screeners never got a chance to ruffle through his bags looking for 6 ounces of shampoo or to question him regarding his choice of footwear, so they had no feasible chance to prevent him and his underwear incendiaries from boarding that plane. The TSA does have some control over the foreign airport screening procedures for flights entering the U.S., but understandable concerns about techniques like "full body imaging" have prevented more intrusive screening procedures until now.

And one of the most scrutinized aspects of the incident, the failure to put Abdulmutallab on the so-called "No Fly List," is also probably not the TSA's fault. Although under the suzerainty of the TSA, most of the info for the list comes from intelligence agencies who were not ready to recommend that Abdulmutallab was a serious flight risk.

Other agencies perhaps had a chance to stop this, but the TSA was simply out of the loop.

Still, the sempiternal government urge to do something, anything, in the face of crisis remains, so the TSA is using the attack to further expand its already ridiculously convoluted and often counterproductive screening regimen at domestic and foreign airports and to institute a bevy of useless rules on the behavior of airlines passengers themselves. Many commentators are right to call this mere "security theater."

As usual it is the government's response to crisis, as opposed to its handling of the crisis itself, that is most disturbing here. The TSA's responses to multiple crises over the last eight years, many self-inflicted, are almost all perfect examples of poor diagnosis and misdirected effort. Although the TSA should not bear the burden of fault in this particular case, the agency has become an ever larger and more unmanageable part of the national security bureaucracy that is making us all less, not more, safe.

The History of the TSA

The TSA was created on November 19, 2001, after George W. Bush signed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, which passed with little debate barely two months after the September 11 attacks. Here again there was the desire to do something, anything, that appeared to be "proactive" against the terrorist threat. The act created the new agency and gave them the authority to hire federal airport screeners and to direct airport security procedures.

The problem was that individual airports already performed their own security and screening prior to 2001, so the TSA didn't create any new layer of security, it merely displaced the old security workers. Previously airports contracted out security to firms like ITS and Wackenhut, and in general they did a good job of it, because, for obvious reasons, airlines and airports have a serious incentive to prevent their planes from getting hijacked or exploded.

September 11th changed this impression of general competence, however, and some blamed private security screeners for missing the terrorists. It is important to note though that the 9/11 terrorists did not get through security because of lax enforcement, they got through because box-cutters weren't supposed to set off any security bells, and up until then almost no one claimed that they should.

Still, many argued that only government civil servants, famous everywhere for their dedication, resourcefulness, and efficiency, could correctly manage the complex task of airport security.

Surprisingly to some, numerous indications show that these civil servants have not lived up to expectations.

As required by the 2001 act, the TSA allows a few airports to opt-out of the federal screeners system through their Screening Partnership Program (SPP). Those seventeen airports that have chosen to opt-out, such as Kansas City and San Francisco International airports, have been shown to be significantly more effective at detecting bomb material coming onto airlines in TSA's own tests. These private screeners missed around 20% of hidden bomb materials surreptiously snuck on the plane by TSA agents, which sounds fairly damning until you compare it to the 60% missed at TSA-run airports like Chicago's O'Hara. Another recent study by the TSA seems to confirm the same pattern.

In earlier tests from the 1990s, before the TSA took over airport security, only about 40% of the hidden bomb material made it through. This means the TSA has somehow succeeded in making airport screeners worse at their jobs after spending over 40 billion dollars during a decade of almost paralyzing fear about terrorism on airlines. Truly astounding.

One might then expect all TSA airports to escape the agency's grasp and jump on the privatization bandwagon, but expansion of the private program has been hampered due to concern that both the airports and the companies they hire might be liable for any mishaps even while the TSA is shielded by sovereign immunity. Another problem is that the 2001 act, in a clear handout to federal employee unions, requires any private contractors hired to have at least the same pay and benefits package as the TSA's federal employees. And they aren't cheap.

So instead of leading to institutional reform, the continual horror stories about bomb material, guns, and terrorists slipping past TSA workers leads politicians to fall back on the default solution: throwing more money at the failing agency. Obama, desperate to show the world that he can be just as wasteful as Bush when it comes to national security, has increased the TSA's budget by another 11% just last year, mainly with the goal of purchasing expensive explosive detection devices from a few major companies such as L-3 and GE. These would further scrutinize checked and carry-on baggage with high-tech scanning equipment, even though no major terrorist has tried to sneak a bomb on a bag for years. The 9/11 hijackers didn't, Richard Reid didn't, and Umar Abdulmuttallab certainly didn't. Still, a big budget solution has the benefit of looking "proactive."

All told, the TSA now spends over seven billion dollars a year, and it has very little to show for it. It is perhaps worthwhile to chronicle some of their more egregious failings.

This December, the same month as the Christmas bomber, the TSA inadvertently releasedits screening manual to the general public, detailing all of its screening procedures to any potential terrorist who might be curious. It also recently lost a hard drive containing over 100,000 of its employees social security numbers and bank codes. Its agents have regularly (very regularly) been accused of stealing flyers' personal items, and some have already been convicted.

Although the TSA doesn't handle all aspects of the infamous "No Fly List," its management of the list has come in for a justified amount of ribbing over the years. The list has admittedly stopped several dangerous persons from boarding American airplanes, including several Senators and Congresspersons, some children under five, marines returning from war, my own mother (a Smithsonian employee on government travel), Nelson Mandela, and, perhaps most impressively, federal air marshals sent to protect flights. One of the main problem seems to be that the List only classifies people by their names, and a similar name is enough to elicit a "match" and to refuse someone the right to travel. Of course in the grand tradition of government programs this long list of names doesn't come cheap. Merely maintaining the names-only list in its current condition, meaning listing heads of state and missing known terrorists, has cost the government at least $500 million dollars over the last 8 years.

Of course the TSA has celebrated all of these much heralded accomplishments. As early as 2004 it threw a half a million dollar party where $81,000 in plaques were awarded to its employees for their success thus far.

Errol Southers and Collective Barganing

Any and all of these problems have been exacerbated recently because the TSA has been functioning without an appointed administrator since Obama took office, almost 12 long months ago.

Of course some will place the blame for the lack of an administrator on the Republicans, more specifically on Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), who has placed a senatorial hold on the president's nominee to head the agency, Errol Southers.

DeMint is certainly the proximate cause of the empty position, but this is merely an unfortunate side effect of having a politicized agency. Lack of consensus among elected officials can easily lead to "policy paralysis," and this can prevent an agency from either evolving or acting at all. It is not just Republican obstructionism, it is the very nature of politics running an agency such as the TSA. There is no way to prevent it.

And Jim DeMint's fear about the president's nominee pushing for the unionization of the TSA workers is certainly legitimate. Erroll Southers has refused to say whether he will demand collective bargaining for TSA employees (as DeMint says, "It seems that the only person who pays any attention to TSA who hasn't formed an opinion is Erroll Southers, the man who wants to run the agency"), but since Obama has explicitly endorsed collective bargaining it seems likely his nominee will too, in which case holding up the nomination can only be good for national security. (There is also of course the little matter of Southersmisleading Congress about using a police database to spy on his ex-wife's boyfriend, but I'll leave that to others).

As James Sherk has shown, collective bargaining has already hampered other government security agencies and it would hamper the TSA too. For one, the Treasury Employees union recently brought the Customs and Border Protection Agency to an arbitration hearing for changing security procedures without first consulting the union. Any attempt by the TSA to change security procedures in the face of a threat would bring the same result.

And the TSA's labor contracts are restrictive enough. Already airports are complaining that the TSA's work rules require year round employees, which means there are hundreds of underemployed workers whiling away the slow winter months even though the summer-time travel rush is met with understaffed lines. Collective bargaining would exacerbate these labor issues.

And the CBO has already estimated that a proposed bill which would bring TSA employees into the federal pay schedule and require collective bargaining would cost the governmentabout $700 million over five years, and that is without factoring any potential pay or benefit increases from the bargaining itself. Merely hiring the labor specialists to conduct the bargaining negotiations would cost about $61 million.

In what is perhaps a foretaste of things to come, a screener labor union's dispute with a private security company at the Toronto airport in 2006 caused the union's workers to pass almost 250,000 passengers and their luggage through the security gates with little or no screening while thousands of other individuals and their bags were extensively checked, leading to delays. AFGE blandishments to the contrary, unionization and collective bargaining would bring the same contentious relationship to the TSA.

Solutions

Ultimately, America has to give up the resource-heavy, time-wasting TSA model and try other methods of security. There is an interesting case to be made for the "Israeli model" used at Ben Gurion airport, where screeners focus on personal inspection of flyers as opposed to their luggage, but I agree there is certainly a question of "scalability" in this United States of 300 million people.

Perhaps ultimately we have to acknowledge that some terrorists will get through, and some planes will be lost. Although that may be difficult for some politicians to admit, it is a simple and unimpeachable truth. Just like we cannot protect every transit rider, ever driver, or every pedestrian, we cannot protect every plane.

And even with the current terrorist threat flying remains safer than absolutely any mode of travel.

Of course everyone knows that flying is safer than driving, but I think few people know exactly how much safer. Flying today is astoundingly safe. If one uses the most common measure, deaths per passenger kilometer traveled, airplane travelers suffer only 0.05 deaths per billion passenger kilometers traveled. That number may be hard to conceptualize, but it means that only a single passenger fatality occurs for every 450,000 trips taken by a passenger around the entire globe. If somebody took a flight around the planet every day for a 1000 years on typical commercial airliner they would still be more likely to survive than not. And flying has continually and constantly gotten safer for the past 100 years, and safety will most likely continue to improve in the future. The continual underestimation of flying safety has dangerous consequences. One Michigan study showed that fear of flying in the three months after September 11th probably led to about 1,000 deaths in car crashes due to increased auto travel. Relative to an airplane traveler, an auto driver today is about 70 times more likely to die on a trip of a similar distance.

So perhaps the best thing we as a nation can do in the wake of this incident is to remain calm and remember, despite the endless hassles on the TSA's security line, that flying is still an incredibly safe and efficient way to travel.

Film of worldwide airline traffic over 24-hours