TSA does need to improve. However, there's a delicate balance between risk management and risk avoidance.

Risk avoidance is clearly the easier of the two: if it remotely presents a potential threat, then don't let it aboard. The problem with that approach is, as pointed out previously, that items as innocent as ball point pens would have to be prohibited because they could be potentially used as weapons for gouging eyes, stabbing the carotid artery or reinforcing a jab to the solar plexis. The danger in advocating a risk avoidance approach is that you can never draw the line between a reasonable measure of security and its outrageous extreme. You can always justify increasing security. Statements, like those of Michael Boyd, tend to suggest a risk avoidance approach when he says, "we've accomplished almost nothing." However, I do agree with one thing he says, and I'll get to that later.

Risk management is the trickier alternative to risk avoidance. It means accepting a certain degree of risk based on the true likelihood of that risk ever materializing. In my ball point pen example, the vast majority of passengers passing through the checkpoint, about 99.9% of them, don't intend to use their ball point pens to gouge eyes, stab arteries or poke stomachs. The threat posed by the fractional minority of those who are capable of using ball point pens as weapons is mitigated by the presence of air marshals and the increased likelihood that unarmed passengers would probably be more willing to jump the assailant and pound the sh*t out of him and his Cross Executive writing instrument. The problem with risk management is that there's always some yahoo sitting in the peanut gallery who can criticize flaws and weaknesses.

Here's my take on the article:

Agree on the cargo checks. If it goes on an airplane, it needs to be screened. Period. Boyd makes a good point. TSA needs to remedy this.

Disagree on the airport and airline personnel access to secure areas. This is risk avoidance rather than risk management. Airport employees must undergo a criminal background check. Perhaps we need to improve the extent of that background check, but that's another issue. Point is that the purpose of a background check is to establish trustworthiness, and that is risk management. I don't disagree with the notion of recurrent background checks for additional derogatory information that was either missed by the initial check or developed once the employee was cleared. Again, that's risk management.

This is your typical public relations hogwash. Figures lie and liars figure. This is not meant to degrade the hard work of screeners across the country who are following procedure and doing their jobs as they've been trained to do. This is my personal criticism of those at the top who twist the hard work of troops in the trenches into some Beltway mumbo-jumbo for some public relations and/or political gain.

This is risk avoidance again, plus it's somewhat misleading. All accessible property carried by passengers onto aircraft are screened by x-ray. In those cases where the x-ray operator either suspects that a bag may contain an explosive or cannot discount the possibility of explosives being inside the bag, a follow-up screening is performed with explosives detection technology. In the event of an alarm, a protocol is followed to determine if there's a real explosive or if it's a false-positive due to some other mitigating circumstances. In addition to that, bags are also ETD screened at random even after they've cleared the x-ray machine. To screen every single carry on item with an ETD machine will not only slow checkpoint screening down to a snail's pace, but it will result in a whole lot more false-positives. I think the follow-up protocols to x-ray examination coupled with random ETD screening are sound risk management methodologies.

Screening passengers is another issue. And I agree that TSA needs to improve in that regard. We've beaten the Richard Reid shoe bomb to death, and I won't resurrect that debate in here other than to say that TSA needs to train its screeners on which shoes specifically should be targeted for additonal screening. The current standard of inch thick soles is vulnerable to broad interpretation and subjective judgement.

TSA has, in my judgement, taken a giant step backwards by allowing people to pass through wearing sports coats, running jackets, sweaters and other secondary outer garments. Given the choice between adapting even more intrusive measures to make sure nobody has C4 explosives packed underneath a jacket and simply removing outer garments for a visual inspection by the screener, I would think that the latter is preferred by the majority of the traveling public. Anyone who has unusual bulges or appears to be concealing something can be referred to secondary screening. Instances of women who are weaing only a bra underneath a leather coat, for example, can be handled discreetly in private screening as exceptions to the outer garment removal rule. What the Dallas News article is suggesting is that all passengers undergo some measure of ETD screening of their bodies. That's impractical and opens a wide range of privacy issues. Again, risk managment needs to take precedence over risk avoidance.

I've already made my views known about selectee screening. It's unnecessary and pointless. However, I don't disagree with the idea of terror watch lists. My take on it is, though, that if your name appears on it, then you don't fly. Of course, this means that the airline has to make every effort to confirm that it has correctly identified the individual in question as discussed in another thread (brooklynflyer's dilemma). I also agree that these lists have to be more than just names. It has to have as much detailed data as possible, photographs where possible. It has to be a true data bank that allows airlines the ability to query it just to make sure they've correctly identified the person in question. My point is that if a person is on a list as suspected of being a terrorist, then hand-wanding him, x-raying and hand-checking his property, and allowing him on an airplane is ludicrous!

However, selectee screening is a reality. The 9/11 Commission has blessed it as a sound security procedure and no amount of b*tching by us screeners or you passengers is going to make it go away. Faced with that reality, I advocate a more reasonable CAPPS that allows a degree of discretion by both the airlines and TSA checkpoint supervisors so that we don't selectee screen 90 year old grandmothers. I think the criteria needs to be upgraded and based on a more realistic, again, risk management-oriented, profile. One way tickets are not illegal. The legitimate reasons for purchasing a one-way ticket far outnumber the illegitimate ones.

Sorry, had to laugh at this one. Citing this web site as providing some insight into TSA employee-employer relations is like citing a Ku Klux Klan website for insight into racial equality.

This is a worn-out excuse for both employees and passengers alike. While TSA is a relatively new organization, the federal government and its bureaucracy is not. This alludes to many other issues that are internal to TSA such as pay discrepancies, insurance claims, injury compensation and other similar issues covered by the "please-be-patient-but-we're-a-brand-new-organization" excuse. It also applies to the frustration experienced by many passengers regarding shoe removal policies, selectee screening and the overzealous prohibited items list.

I agree that TSA can improve, but I advocate improving it towards the risk management side and not the risk avoidance one.

I've shared the good, bad and the ugly with you. Go ahead....take your shots.