Washington
Invariably, the response from passengers when officers from the Transportation Security Administration seize the weapons is: Oops, I forgot I had it.
“It’s always astonishing to me that people can forget they have a weapon in their carry-on,” TSA Administrator Peter V. Neffenger said. “I’m not sure why people continue to do this.”
Not everyone buys the excuse of forgetfulness.
“They didn’t forget their pants. It’s beyond me,” said David Borer, general counsel of the American Federation of Government Employees, a union that represents the nation’s 42,000 or so transportation security officers.
Whether the reason is memory lapse or a desire to be prepared should armed terrorists once again try to commandeer an aircraft, the seizure of a record 2,653 firearms last year at airport checkpoints is but one aspect of an evolving security panorama as the nation passes the 15-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The security ritual now has a familiar rhythm: Shoes off. Laptops out. Everything through the X-ray machine. Nearly 2 million passengers endure the drill each day. Many hate it. A few get unruly.
The tools deployed by the security agents — including full-body scanners — get ever more sophisticated while the most basic of questions go without a satisfying answer: Do all the security measures work? Are terrorists truly deterred? Are we safe?
Experts agree on only one thing. Heightened airport security is here to stay.
“It’s going to take a long time before we stop taking our shoes off,” said Bruce Schneier, a security technologist and fierce critic of the TSA.
It’s hard to pick apart the security procedures the federal government has adopted and not arrive at the conclusion, as Schneier has, that much of it is “security theater.”
Seeming failures abound. An audit last year found that TSA officers found weapons only three times when undercover investigators passed through airport security checkpoints 70 times with weapons or mock explosives, a failure rate of 95 percent. The then-administrator lost his job.
“We are not safer than before 9/11, regardless of the money and energies spent to change airport security,” said Michael Boyd, an aviation consultant and longtime former airline executive based out of Evergreen, Colo. “The TSA approach is a dud. It is a giant bureaucracy with zero accountability for failure.”
Events in the past month underscore how TSA officers, who are unarmed, behave in the face of potential terror. On the night of Aug. 14, when false reports circulated of gunshots at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, TSA officers and civilian security guards left their posts and joined a stampede of hundreds of travelers. Borer said TSA policy was for officers to “run, hide, fight,” in that order, in the event of any attack, and that the officers had not been disobeying orders. Still, the incident raised questions about what might unfold in the event of a real terrorist attack.
Two weeks later, panic broke out at Los Angeles International Airport when loud noises led to rumors of an active shooter. Several terminals were evacuated, and passengers and TSA officers alike breached security doors to flee to the airport tarmac.
Panicked people, Boyd said, were “chasing off in all directions like a herd of gazelles running from thunder. TSA has no plan in the event of an incident, except to tell people to run away from the noise, or dump them into the street in a nice tight crowd for a terrorist target.”
The hassles of slipping off shoes, pulling laptops out of bags and emptying coins from pockets have spurred applications for expedited security screening. Known as TSA PreCheck, the program lets low-risk travelers ease through checkpoints without removing shoes.
Some 12,000 applicants a day pony up the $85 for five-year memberships, after waiting six weeks for appointments, and total numbers have surpassed 3.5 million. According to Secretary Jeh Johnson of the Department of Homeland Security, 96 percent of PreCheck passengers spend an average of five minutes or less at security checkpoints.
“We’ve turned security into have and have-not,” Schneier said: the PreCheck passengers who’ve paid their money and the rest of the traveling public.
Even the famed air marshals, whose numbers soared after Sept. 11, have come under fire. The program, which puts armed agents on high-risk domestic flights, costs more than $820 million annually. In theory, the marshals are the last line of defense before a terrorist hijacking. In practice, more air marshals appear to have been arrested for felony crimes they themselves have committed than make arrests in the line of duty.
When the bureau responded to a freedom of information request earlier this year by ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative newsroom, more than seven years after the request was made, it acknowledged that air marshals had been arrested 148 times from 2002 through the early 2012 for various crimes unrelated to their work.
While air marshals attended to “thousands” of medical emergencies and non-terrorist incidents involving unruly passengers, they apparently carry out few arrests of real terror suspects. A Federal Air Marshal Service spokesman, Thomas H. Kelly, did not address a request for a breakdown of incidents.
A Tennessee Republican U.S. lawmaker, John J. Duncan, said in 2010 that the air marshals service had made an average of 4.2 arrests per year from 2001 to 2010, adding that “we are spending $200 million per arrest.”