underpressure

Not in any way defending indefensible acts.....

But isn't the fact this guy was a TSA Employee incidental to the story? I mean we have judges/cops/teachers/preachers accused and convicted of this abhorrent behavior every day. Was he acting in his capacity of a TSA employee when he conducted any part of this heinous action?

When a teacher does it do we throw out the board of education? The Policeman, the police force? The Judge, the Bar Association?

knotyeagle

And in Richmond (RIC), Virginia they decided to hire the convicted felon as a TSA Screener anyway. When did it become acceptable for a public servant to lie to the very public he or she is supposed to serve?

Ari

They mean of criminal history.

What else do they check? TSO's, care to chime in?

Boggie Dog

Yet if I remember correctly just recently TSA was pressuring an airport authority to give a SIDA badge to a known felon employed by TSA.

So does TSA just check criminal history and still hand out the jobs?

tom911

A significant background to me, and one I and all my coworkers underwent at local PD level, included psychological screening and a polygraph. A fingerprint check sure seems like a very minimal background check. Do they have investigators out contacting neighbors, former employers, references? What is the background process other than submitting a set of fingerprint cards?

N830MH

Yes, you are absolutely correct! It won't be accepted work at airports for a long time. It will be taking the SIDA badge away from him. He will never ever work at federalization anymore.

senseker

Not defending this scum of the earth, but even if someone goes through a background check, if something happens that's NEVER happened before in their history, how is it TSA's fault? I mean, if this guy had never had a history of sexual crimes, or any crimes at all, a background check would do nothing. I mean, police officers go through intense background checks, and yet there are a few a year that kill and rape and do other horrible crimes. Can't catch people on horrible behavior if it's never happened before.

jkhuggins

Obviously, it's not TSA's fault. That's not really the issue.

As I see it, stories like this call a couple of TSA's standard arguments into question.

1. TSA says that TSOs, airline employees, and so on don't need to be screened when they come through TSA checkpoints, because they're "trusted" based on their background checks. TSA critics have pointed out repeatedly that passing a background check doesn't eliminate the need for screening, because someone who's passed a background check might still do something untrustworthy. Stories like this prove that point.

2. TSA says that BDOs can detect those whose conduct deserves further scrutiny, simply by observing their behavior. One wonders, if such criminal conduct is evident on the face of a ne'er-do-well, why BDOs aren't detecting the presence of such criminals within their own ranks.

Superguy

Yet SPOT thinks it can.

If spotniks can't pick out criminals like this in their very midst, how can we expect them to find a terrorist, or someone with terrorist intent (who hasn't done anything terroristic before )?

Scubatooth

That is very close to the check that was done on me for one my clearance(s). There were a few other pieces to it, but then again if i did some of the abuses that TSA has done, i would loose my CHL, professional certifications and most likely in jail for decades and when i got released a felony conviction doesnt exactly help one get a job.

Everyone needs to hammer on this with there congress critter, maybe if enough people hammer it should get the bell ringing that congress needs to do something or there reelection chances will go down big-time. The critters in my district have all been sent letters recently and will keep getting them till they respond; do something or are voted out.

I have other views on rapists but they violate the TOS wholesale, so i will refrain.

doober

Psychological testing could very well have caught this guy before he had done anything. Such testing MUST BE instituted by TSA in light of strip machines or "thorough"
pat downs.

Remember the reporter who applied for and obtained a job as a screener? TSA never contacted her past employer nor her neighbors nor her references.

N965VJ

I don�t recall that one; but I would like to know more.

doober

I did a Google search but didn't come up with a link - probably didn't use good parameters.

As I recall it was a woman......

knotyeagle

http://www.concierge.com/cntraveler/articles/10624

It takes two minutes to fill out the information requested on the application and press the send button. Within three weeks, I receive an e-mail saying that I've made it past the first round. I then report to a location I was told not to reveal, for a surprisingly arduous test of my aptitude for picking weapons out of what amounts to a lineup of X-ray images of baggage. After an hour, I leave with a throbbing headache and the conviction that I've failed completely. But that same day, I receive another e-mail from the TSA with an effusive opener: "Congratulations! You have passed the�test to become a transportation security officer with the TSA."

Within a few days, I am directed by another e-mail communiqu� to a TSA office at an airport. There, I am fingerprinted and consent to the expected background investigation. (I have no reason to assume it wasn't done, but not one of the half-dozen references I gave, including people who have worked with me professionally, was contacted.)

My "interviews" are so detached and impersonal that they could have been carried out by a robot. My first face-to-face with a TSA official consists of my sitting mutely while she reads to me stiffly from a script. I am then ushered into a different office, where another interviewer asks me a series of generic questions that he reads from his computer screen ("Have you ever helped anyone in need without being asked?"). The queries offer no opportunity for probing, and never during the hiring process am I asked about my reasons for wanting this job. One assistant tells me: "We are supposed to ask everyone the same questions," which, if correct, seems a rather literal-minded interpretation of a government-fairness policy.

When I'm contacted by phone, I get the odd feeling that I'm talking to someone in a telemarketing center. When I finally ask where the caller is located, I learn that I'm not dealing with the TSA directly but with Accenture HR Services, a division of the giant consultancy which was created out of the remains of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm. A quick check on the Internet reveals that Accenture and another recruiting firm, CPS Human Resource Services, were hired as a sort of "rent-a-personnel department" for the fledgling TSA. The contracts were valued at $776 million over five years. Although the TSA is hardly hiring at the pace it was five years ago�when some sixty thousand employees were needed to fill the ranks�the contracts with the two consultants are still in effect.

I wait for the next call, and within a few days it comes. I am asked how fast I can get to a clinic, where I can dispense with the last remaining step, a drug test and physical exam. I report to a shabby facility, where I spend several hours sitting in a crowded waiting room for what turns out to be a cursory test of my eyesight and hearing. The staff seem to be unaware which federal agency I am applying to, and I remind them that they'll need a urine sample when they seem ready to dismiss me. The following day, I get a call from a very pleasant woman who tells me there was a "problem" with the physical and explains that the clinic forgot to test my stamina. This is a sensitive issue: screeners have one of the federal government's highest rates of job-related injuries, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the TSA spends more than fifty million dollars a year in disability payments. Since injuries are mainly due to hoisting checked luggage and overstuffed carry-ons, weeding out weaklings from the pool of recruits is a high priority. When I tell the woman that I fear a return trip to the clinic will set the hiring process back another few weeks, she sweetly reassures me. "Don't worry, hon, you won't have to go back. Are you sitting down?"

I dutifully take a seat at the kitchen table.

"Now, lift your arm. Can you bend it?"

This, then, is how I finally become a transportation security officer: sitting alone in my bathrobe in a suburban kitchen, flapping my arms around and hoping that this bizarre pantomime is not an indication of what is to come.

On a Monday morning in September, I travel to a hotel on the outskirts of the airport to be sworn in as a screener.

"This is not like being on the assembly line! It's not like working at the mall!" a tall, ruddy-faced man standing at the front of the room roars at me and the dozens of other new screeners in the hotel banquet room. An assistant to the local federal security director, he is here to induct us into government service. We're groggy after hours spent filling out routine forms, and this fevered peroration is a welcome diversion.

"You are the last line of defense! Your life will literally be in danger!" he continues. The young man sitting next to me is impressed. "Like, this is our boss? He's really a cool guy." For a few moments, we're invited to imagine our importance on the front lines of the war on terror.

But before we can get to the action at the airport, we must undergo what we are promised will be a grueling two-week regimen of ten-hour-a-day classes�a sharp contrast to the ten hours of classroom instruction and twenty to thirty hours of on-the-job training pre-9/11 screeners got from their private employers. The intensive instruction we're facing is one of the many reforms in the Aviation and Transportation Security Act passed by Congress two months after 9/11. The message drummed into us today is that we're entering a boot camp from which only a few lucky aspirants will emerge.

The next morning, when we report to our classroom in a nearby office building, our numbers have already dwindled: There are twenty of us, ranging in age from early twenties to early sixties and including a retired air-traffic controller, an emergency medical technician, a former hotel concierge, and several college students and laid-off airline workers. Our diversity is largely a function of our status as part-timers�in fact, the airport hasn't had any full-time openings in several months due to budget constraints. The part-time hiring spree that brought me and the others in was supposed to help airports fill staffing shortages after Congress cut the national full-time screener workforce from a high of sixty thousand in 2003 to forty-three thousand today. But apparently at big airports like mine, it's not having the desired effect: Turnover among part-time screeners can be as high as fifty percent, about double the rate for screeners overall. Within a few days, I learn what could be at least part of the reason for the high turnover: Some trainees confess that they hope to use the screener post as a springboard to an easier job with better hours at another federal agency, such as the Customs Service, and that they aren't planning a career with the TSA.

FriendlySkies

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