Tell the Truth and Lose Your Job

Fifty-year old Chris Liu, who had gone by the pseudonym "The Patriot Pilot" and was deputized by the TSA, lost his federally-issued gun and badge after posting cell phone videos on YouTube critical of San Francisco International Airport security.

[...]

"Clearly, from the world-wide response my story has received, I have really made people at the TSA angry," he wrote. "I am sorry about that, as it was never my intent to piss people off. I only wanted to make aviation safer by pointing out what I though was a major security problem that was not getting properly addressed by the TSA, while the rest of us were getting screened, scanned, groped, x-rayed and generally treated pretty poorly; all at a cost of billions and billions of dollars."

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A major problem with airport security is that ground crews can access the airport tarmac and any aircraft without having to be screened by security. The next major attack may not occur in the cabin of an aircraft, but on the tarmac of an airport, Liu warned.

  Raw Story

And about those x-ray machines:

“It’s not an explosive detector; it’s an anomaly detector,” Clark Ervin, who runs the Homeland Security Program at the Aspen Institute, told the Post. “Someone has to notice that there’s something out of order.”

Which means those security employees who stare at the screens have to be sharp enough and well-trained enough to detect things that are abnormal. (And some experts think that if the explosives are flat and pancake-shaped and taped to your stomach, they could not be detected anyway, because the picture would look too normal.)

  Politico

That should be easy enough to determine. Surely that information is out there, and may explain some of the failure rate we've heard about for TSA airport security.

Citing an ABC report, [CNN’s Candy] Crowley said, “There are some major airports who had a 70 percent failure rate at detecting guns, knives, bombs, that they got through in your tests…. So how good can it be when you have major airports with a 70 percent fail rate?”

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According to the Post, by New Year’s Day, there will be 500 such machines in use nationwide and 1,000 by the end of 2011, or roughly one machine for every two security lanes in every airport in the land.

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The machines cost $130,000 to $170,000 each, and by 2014, the federal government will have spent $234 million to $300 million for them.

Which would be a bargain if they actually did something besides embarrass people. In May, a TSA screener at Miami International Airport who went through a full-body screening as part of his training was arrested for beating a co-worker with a police baton after co-workers made fun of the size of his private parts.

The solution for passengers? Get used to it.

Because heaven knows we’re not going to suddenly become a reasonable country.

[Secretary of homeland security Janet] Napolitano dismissed [the rate of failure information] as old and questionable and said, “Let’s set those aside.” One of the real successes of the machines and procedures, Napolitano said, is that they discourage terrorists from even trying to get on planes.

In other words, the machines keep us safe even if they don’t work at all.

“What we know is that you can’t measure [how] the devices … are deterring [terrorists] from going on a plane,” Napolitano said.

“Just people who just are discouraged, thinking they’d be found out,” said Crowley.

“Exactly,” said Napolitano.

In which case, we do not need machines that cost upward of $130,000 each.

I’m sure if the stockholders and manufacturers of the machinery weren’t connected with the lawmakers and bought by taxpayer money, airports would already be using the x-ray machine equivalent of the mannequin sitting in a patrol car on the street corner.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.