An informative article from Lee Davidson at the Salt Lake Tribune:
The Salt Lake Tribune:
How safe is air travel? Who knows? TSA doesn’t
Airport security is impossible to judge based on the agency’s haphazard data.
First Published Jan 20 2013 12:36 am • Last Updated Jan 21 2013 11:52 am
A short quote:
...The Salt Lake Tribune found huge holes in that TSA data that raise questions about the information’s value in charting the effectiveness of airport security.
For example, TSA stopped counting confiscated firearms for three years. In 2008, it quit counting eight of 13 major categories of banned items, including knives, ammunition and box cutters (the weapon used by 9/11 terrorists).
The hit-and-miss data show TSA does not know how many total prohibited items are surrendered, so it cannot accurately track rates of such activity nationwide or at specific airports.
"If TSA is continually changing the parameters of how they test, truly they have no idea of how they are doing," said Douglas Laird, head of an aviation-security consulting firm. He is the former security director of Northwest Airlines and a former Secret Service agent.