DHS and TSA Leak Like an Old Rowboat

Associated Press reported on December 30 that the U.S. Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) is going after travel bloggers Steve Frischling and Chris Elliott. The two bloggers published details of a confidential TSA security directive or memo which was issued in the wake of the December 25th attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines passenger flight. Frischling and Elliott claim to have received the details of the security directive from an anonymous source.

According to Eileen Sullivan's Associated Press report, the directive was dated Dec. 25 and was issued after a 23-year-old Nigerian man was charged with attempting to bomb a Northwest Airlines flight as it approached Detroit from Amsterdam. The bomb, which allegedly was hidden in Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's underwear, malfunctioned and no one was killed. Authorities said the device included a syringe and a condom-like bag filled with powder that the FBI determined to be PETN, a common explosive.

The TSA and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are in some important respects fractured organizations beset by intra-agency management power plays, and inter-agency communications difficulties. None of the problems are unusual in themselves — there isn't a big organization anywhere on the planet that doesn't suffer some of the same ills. The problem with these sorts of difficulties at TSA and DHS is that both agencies are responsible for people's lives. The horrible complexity imposed by inter-departmental communications — providing raw intelligence to various members and sub-agencies that can put it to use — amongst the dozens of players, security providers, investigators, intelligence organs and policing bodies over which DHS in particular is supposed to have jurisdiction, amounts to a mile high mountain that must be climbed every hour of every day. It's a hell of a lousy way to run a security and intelligence supervisory agency.

Information leaks out of government agencies like water from an open tap. It just keeps flowing and flowing. The most public thing the TSA seems to have done about this latest leak is to start pumping the bloggers for information.

The TSA and DHS are crippled by their own complexities. They and their sub-agencies need to redesign and re-implement their processes, procedures and poorly wrought inter-agency communications to create a truly cohesive and cooperatively efficient domestic security force. Fat chance. Sadly, it will likely happen only after so devastating a disaster takes place that even the most deeply entrenched, pork-barreling, party-loyal Senators, Congressional representatives and senior bureaucrats are finally heaved from office.

As always, the toughest decisions for national security are made only after the blood of citizens has been shed by some terrorizing monster bent on some insane mission. The problem which really creeps me out right now is that even in the long wake of 9/11, and after all the dead and wounded servicemen and servicewomen shipped home from Iraq and Afghanistan over the past few years, the politicians and senior bureaucrats are still jealously protecting their state and district empires, agonizing more about re-election than their constituents, and carefully tending to their big corporate sponsors.

Canada has little more to offer; the UK less still. Canadians are struggling with an insular federal government which spends more time talking to itself than its taxpaying citizens. The specter of a police state edging into view in the UK rears its ugly head with each successive arrest of yet another group of Islamist plotters. The European Union seems to have been lured into a bureaucratic minefield of its own making, while hoping its citizens will kind of hold it all together, starting in surprise at the immigrant unrest and outright rioting in the poorest neighborhoods of the largest cities. Oh dear United States of America — rest assured you're not alone.

We're dying out here, and we're paying big taxes for the dubious honor of yet again being threatened by a terrorist who yet again has circumvented security at an airport. The overworked security staff at Pearson International Airport did, however, manage to snag a pair of fingernail clippers two weeks ago from my carry-on. Kept me waiting for ten minutes while they were (I presume) deciding whether or not I was a threat to national security. But Chemical Umar managed to board his Northwest flight just fine. The TSA and DHS should be beating up on themselves for being the cripplingly complex organizations they are today. They can't even keep their own data secure. If the TSA and DHS do their jobs better, they won't have to worry about innocent bloggers.

Airline and Airport Security — What a Mess

Humility and privacy, above all else, should govern the conduct of those individuals, private companies, and government agencies charged with the responsibility of protecting airline passengers and aircraft. What we have right now — what we have had for thirty years or more — is a spectacularly insulting, abusive, but only marginally successful system.

Do you really think that thousands of incidents of harm, violence and terrorism have been averted because airport security ferreted out my 75 year old mother's hairpins, or because the nail clipper you foolishly left in your carry-on was seized, or because a drunk was kept off a flight, or because a man's Swiss Army pocket knife was triumphantly snatched from a pocket. You'd be wrong. The people who want to maim and terrorize just aren't that obvious most of the time. They get caught only when something goes wrong with the scheme they developed to circumvent security. The vast bulk of them get caught — are you ready for this — long before they ever get to an airport.

Terrorists started sneaking weapons on board aircraft, used the weapons to hijack aircraft and kill passengers, so we made it illegal to carry weapons and started putting everybody through metal detectors. The terrorists adapted and figured out how to get box cutters on board, seize crew members and take over the aircraft. So we started scanning and inspecting for trade tools and seizing everything in sight. The terrorists adapted again and started using relatively small amounts of liquid chemicals hidden in hollow shoe heels, whereupon the security services started restricting liquids of all kinds (and how about that rip-off $4 bottle of water at airport shops once you're past security). What did the airport security services do? They made us all take off our shoes, trudging along on dirty carpeting (and worse), while our shoes are being run through a scanner. But the terrorists adapted again, strapping condom-like bags of PETN to their thighs. Our vaunted airport security responded by patting down all U.S.-bound passengers to ensure they aren't wearing anything but their clothing. And because the airport security restrictions are really too much work for any sane person, forget too about bringing any carry-on luggage on board the aircraft, thereby continuing the unbroken pattern of locking the barn door after the horse has bolted.

Does anybody who is not a moron really believe that allowing their typically soft-sided camera bag to be checked into the luggage hold is not going to result in a thousand dollars worth of smashed and ruined camera gear? What a way to start a vacation. Does anybody who is not a moron believe that the airlines are going to improve upon their lost/mis-routed luggage mess? According to SITA, which tracks such things, in 2007 more than 42 million pieces of luggage were mishandled by the world's airlines. That works out to approximately 80 bags per minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; one 'lost' bag for every 90 passengers worldwide, according to SITA. The odds of mishandling are approximately 1 in 145 bags in developed countries, plunging to approximately 1 in 85 in Europe, then down to a miserable (approximately) 1 in 65 in less developed countries. It is into this mess that airport security is insisting more and more often that we check all our bags including carry-ons.

This idiocy has to stop, and there has to be a solution. I say, stop flying — right now. Not forever — just for a month or two. That's what (Kickstartnews.com publisher) David Coppola suggested recently. Stop flying. The fractured economics of the airline industry will split wide open. All of these airlines operating on paper thin margins because they're literally competing themselves to death, will fail and collapse out of existence if we all simply stop flying for a month or two.

Put the airlines and the airports out of business. Start over. The hours-long lines at security gates whenever there's an alert, the lack of true security, restrictions which have no basis in reality, passengers kept waiting on the tarmac for hour after hour while air traffic control sorts itself out, flights which never leave on time, cramped seating, low-cost fares in exchange for on-board food which tastes literally like cardboard (or worse) and for which you have to pay stupidly high prices if you dare to even consider ingesting it in the first place, cramped on-board lavatories in which even anorexic teenagers have trouble turning around, complete lack of carry-on measurement control during normal travel circumstances, idiotic electronic device usage restrictions which have no basis in scientific fact, tens of millions of lost suitcases, and a whole host of other stupidities which serve only to annoy, inconvenience and disrupt our plans.

Tell your sister in Winnipeg, your business associate in Denver, your investor in Madrid, your mother in Bogota, your head office in Osaka, your cousin in Mumbai, or your good friend in London that you're not going to be traveling for a few months. Ground yourself. While we're all doing that, the constipated, dysfunctional, multi-billion dollar boondoggle that is the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the bureaucrats who run the laughably broken interdepartmental communications efforts which permeate and slow down almost every security issue in the United States and the European Union, will have time to rethink how well their internecine battling has served the taxpaying, fare-paying customers — the billions of customers — footing the stunningly massive bill for all the security incompetence, empire building, terrible service and broken promises which have taken place over the last 40 years.

The specter of tens of thousands of children, mothers and grandmothers being frisked at airport security gates after standing in what looks like nothing so much as Depression-era soup lines for an hour or more, is a pathetically awful vision representing the utter failure of competence and communications between and amongst our national and regional security agencies. This is how our fares, tax dollars and absurd security surcharge fees are being spent? Nonsense!

Stop flying, right now, for a couple months. Need to travel because of a family emergency? Fly on a charter. Lobby your Congressman, MP, or whatever your political representative is titled, to insist on legislation which allows you four travel days for every vacation week. Take the car or the train. Want to travel overseas? In a better world, your own government (you know, the government that issues your passport after investigating you), will issue an identity verification and security risk verification every time you book a flight. If the system spits out your name as a risk, you'll be notified by email to attend a separate security area set up at each and every airport in the world (all of which do have the space) to go through special security. No lines, no waiting.

In my world too, the fatuous, arrogant bureaucrats at different agencies who selfishly fail to communicate with each other quickly about perceived threats, will be held accountable for every injury and death which occurs because someone didn't pass along information or punch through the lines to inform the right people, or act (and, maybe, make a mistake), rather than sitting and musing about whether or not the political climate was right. It's enough to make you want to sit up and start a wholesale revolt against the people into whose hands we place our safety.

Security, as any truly experienced and successful expert will tell you, begins long before you ever get to an airport. Suspected subversives who are being tracked can't be allowed to fly, or indeed travel anywhere without special searches and special attention. Call it profiling if you like. When I was a kid — a white, Jewish kid in Winnipeg, Canada — I went to rock concerts at which I was profiled. After all, white Jewish teenagers (according to the local cops) were highly likely to be attempting to smuggle booze and dope into the venue. You know what? The cops were right. We didn't call it profiling then. We just said, "Damn cops caught me!" Guilty is guilty. So who are you and why are you traveling? What have you purchased and why have you purchased it? Where have you been recently? Who do you hang with? The bulk of security checks should be done when you purchase a ticket — in other words, when we've all got the time to undergo security. Think that sounds bad? You're right. But it doesn't sound half as bad as an explosion three rows back which happened because the system we've got doesn't scare anyone except you, your Mom and me.