Interesting article.
I am currently a student at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and am in a course on privatization analysis. On the first day of class we discussed the TSA takeover of airport security.
After all the back and forth, the professor noted that on September 11th, airport security in the U.S. was already not a very profitable business. Apparently even with all the corner-cutting by Argenbright & Co. (hiring people with criminal backgrounds, high turnover, etc.), these companies were barely making a profit on security operations.
With the additional standards imposed post-9/11 (I agree some of them are silly, but some, like real background checks, do make sense), would most private security firms be able to make a profit?
Yonatan