Just guessing but I would suspect Carraway must have done something to force DHS's hand.

I totally agree with you; Pistole had to have known that this was happening.

Could his perfectly pathetic response to Judicial Watch's report concerning complaints about sexual assaults have played into this?

It's pretty unsettling, actually.

It means that if a trained bad guy wants to get things through the checkpoint using methods TSA's Red Team already know about, he has a 95% chance of success.

Statistically, the odds of it involving a plane that I'm going to be on are very small, but they are way greater than zero.

I'm starting to think this was staged and publicized to pave the way for the announcement of some expensive new piece of hardware 'guaranteed' to do the job TSOs don't want to do.

Doubtful. I would bet that Carraway didn't respond to DHS in the way wanted when they learned of the Red Team Test results.

Probably tried that lame excuse of 20 layers of security bs that is always tossed out when TSA screws up.

In the same sense that your odds of being struck by lightning are greater than zero, yes.

You're far more likely to die from a slip & fall in the shower than anything remotely having to do with terrorism. (Unless you're in the US military… in which case your chance of death by suicide is >3x the chance of your death by any enemy action.)

There's a difference? :confused: :D

This raises the fundamental, existential question:

If we really don't face such a substantial risk from terrorism, then why are we spending billions of dollars, and sacrificing our civil liberties, to fight this war on terror? Is this the greatest waste of time, money, and resources in our country's history?

There's a lot of competition for stupid things the US has wasted a whole lot of resources on. TSA is "mere" billions of dollars, after all. History has a whole lot of failures that we generally prefer to quickly forget about… :rolleyes:

I think that 20+ layers of security has been very badly handled by TSA.

All too often, when TSA failed to detect something, they relied on the 20+ layers excuse: 'if one layer fails, another one will catch it".

Two problems with that:

1) Not everything or everyone goes through the exact same 20+ layers when they fly.

2) Unwittingly, TSA has instilled this mindset in its own employees: "Don't worry too much about failing to spot something, because one of the other 19+ layers will catch it."

Yeah. Fortunately for us, when TSA found a live grenade in a carry-on bag but failed to find 2 bricks of undisguised government-issue C4 in the same bag, it was caught.

Unfortunately, it was not caught by the other 19+ layers at FAY, it was caught weeks later at another TSA checkpoint at another airport.

Fortunately for all of us, the guy allowed to take the C4 with him wasn't planning on using it to cause harm. As far as we know.

That case is a particular favorite of mine, as I'm sure you've seen by the way I never fail to mention it when discussing TSA failures.

My greatest question, though, was - how much C4 did he have in his bag on the outgoing flight? Just because he had 5lb of it coming back doesn't mean he had 5lb of it going out. I strongly suspect that he was intentionally carrying the smoker and the C4 so he could put on a big bang show for his kids over the Christmas holiday, and that he had more than two blocks on the outbound flight. The two he tried to bring home were just what was leftover after doing some Crocodile Dundee-style fishing with his kids or demonstrating instantaneous object relocation/reduction with a few other blocks.

Of course it is. But it's impossible to sell that message politically.

I don't think they intentionally announced this.

I say, I'm shocked, just shocked!

Some Context:

The 95% from the sampling size of 70? This isn't a fair summary judgement of the TSA performance. It is statistically insignificant and that is why a politician would say things like "out of context."

For us to make a "whole" judgement about the TSA, we need the sampling to be larger for it to have statistical power. It's like having an edge in playing BlackJack or Poker. Even when the general odds in your favor (by the cards you hold or because you are genius and you can count cards) you can always get beaton by the bad river card or a bad run in one chute of cards. Another exmaple is testing for medicine's efficacy. We simply cannot say a medicine or a surgianl procedure is s success if it works on 95% of the time using only 70 unsuspecting participants.

This is why the TSA conducts these tests for internal purposes as something like this cannot be the representation of their entire performance.

This really is a simple Stat and Probability 101 from college. You people know better than this. At least better than those journalism majors who come on national TV and read telepromters.....

Also the whole reason why we have TSA is not to catch the bad guys at the airport. The inteligence guys actually catches more them by doing investigation even before they go to the airport. It is a meant to be a deterent like the home alarm system (always having false alarms and not working) where the thief doesn't want to bother taking a chance....... just in case they do catch something or someone.

Some more context: the TSA has outright refused to engage in more testing, and all the real testing it has done has shown that their activities don't work. See the GAO reports.

Also, you can certainly get information from that sample. Not as fully as if they tested as often as, say, fast food chains do secret shopping, but it's strong Bayesian evidence that they're doing nothing worthwhile.