TSA/Security article
 

TSA spokeswoman Andrea McCauley, however, said the agency has managed to stay "one step ahead of those who wish to harm us" by taking a "layered" approach to security. Among the layers: reinforced cockpit doors on about 5,800 domestic aircraft, and 45,000 federal screeners who had, through May, intercepted 3.9 million knives and 1,905 guns at airport checkpoints.

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http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont...ety.7307a.html

I wasn't aware that the TSA reinforced the cockpit doors.

"45,000 federal screeners who had, through May, intercepted 3.9 million knives..."

I couldn't care less. Knives are not a credible weapon to hijack an airplane. They might as well have been confiscating candy bars for all the security this theft has added.

"...and 1,905 guns at airport checkpoints."

Great job. How many terrorists were stopped?

Disagree. Knives worked spectacularly well on 9/11. And they will work well again unless the 1)passengers, 2) FAMS and/or 3) the crew were willing to surrender their meat to the metal to stop them.

This is the problem with deterence - you may never know what you stopped. Sometimes you will, but mostly you will not. And you'll never get the press coverage that a horrific incident would have.

Which is obviously the case now. None of us will sit still while a terrorist tries to slit the throat of an FA. On top of which the cockpit door will stay closed and locked no matter what happens in the cabin. Realistically, several large men will happily beat the crap out of any idiot(s) who try to take over a plane now. We wouldn't before 9/11, but we will now. Even if we have to get hurt doing it. It's better than dying and being part of an attack on other people.

Bet your .... I almost feel sorry for the next guys who try to hijack a US flight. They might escape with their lives and end up in jail, but I doubt it.

I hope you are right, although history (including recent Russian history) does not agree with you. What you need is time - time for a few Alphas to rally the rest to fight back. It took United 93 25 minutes to fight back. The Russians in the school watched the kids being killed. Adrenaline and stress are hellacious things, especially if you have no training and experience in dealing with them. If I were a terrorist I would have learned that lesson from United 93 and not give it to you. First person to even look funny, stand up, talk, etc. gets violently and bloodly disemboweled. These guys learn their lessons well and have since 1985. I hope the first few to jump up have people jumping up behind them because otherwise they are DRT.

Cockpit doors DO NOT stay closed all the time and you know this. They are opened for meals, bathroom, etc.

And face this, if you do act you will not "be hurt". More than likely you will "be dead".

Lawdog you are giving the terrorists far more credit than they deserve. They are not Green Berets, nor are they Chuck Norris. Call me over-confident, but I'm quite sure I could have taken out any of the 9/11 terrorists with what they were armed with. The reason they were successful on 9/11 was surprise. No one thought of suicide terrorists in the US at that time. Now we know and now we won't hesitate to react. If the terrorist manages to bring a semi-auto on board then yes the first few who fight back may get torn up. Otherwise I'm sure we can overwhelm anyone who brings a knife to a gang-bang.

As for the cockpit door being open, yes it is at times. In fact in Europe on many flights today they still leave the cockpit door open throughout the flight. But while the pilots fight back, us passengers and the FA will have time to get up there and assist.

As usual, we're fighting the last war
 

Yep -- and muskets worked spectacularly well in the War of 1812.


The average screener won't know and probably nobody at an airport will know. In fact, if a real terrorist bust was going down at an airport, need-to-know would be very restricted. And, it wouldn't be the TSA making the bust.

An airport checkpoint is like my home burgler alarm system. The only bad guys you're deterring are the amateurs. But, this isn't the strategic deterrence business, it's public relations. If the TSA actually caught a real terrorist, I'd bet my mortgage it would be all over the news, and everyone from Bush on down would be taking credit for it.

If you've got access to the TTIC daily reports, read them and see all the amateurs we're catching.

Tell you what, I take the musket and you take nothing. Want to bet on the winner? Tell you what yet again, I'll take the musket and 5 well-trained, experienced men with muskets and you take 100 without them and without training. Want to bet on who will win?


Correct. But I am talking about actually stopping/deterring an incident and not knowing about it at all. Say a team comes to the airport but for some reason or another were spooked and scrubed the mission Who would know? Maybe they scubb it because the TSA confiscated some of the weapons. Any reason would do, but we would never know unless we took someone into custody and then they broke and admitted the plot.

Tell me again, where were the knives during the "recent Russian history"? I don't think anyone here has said it will be easy to stop an explosion, and I would like to see the FAM that can do that.

The 95 guys remaining after the first volley will beat the musketeers to a pulp while they're trying to reload.

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.

Read On Killing by Col. Dave Grossman. It will enlighten you. It follows warfare and personal and impersonal killing from early musket days to today. In WWII only 15-20% of soldiers actually fired their weapons at the enemy. After the war the military looked at these stats and revised their training. Rate was up to 55-60% in Korea. Further revisions were made. That figure was raised to 95% in Vietnam.

The stats don't lie - even trained soldiers in WWII had only, at best, a 20% engagement rate. At that was TRAINED. Want to bet what percentage will "fight back" on a plane? And how long will it take them to do so.

No thanks, I'll stick to the trained (with all the new methodologies) FAMs, FFDOs and LEOs.

Speculation

I HAVE read it and I wasn't terribly impressed on this particular issue. It would take too long to explain why I believe (and why many of my colleagues in my Air War College seminar believe) his numbers were taken out of context and didn't adequately address such key aspects as demographics, tactics & doctrine, force structure, etc, changes that make it virtually impossible, or irrelevant, to normalize the statistics for comparative purposes. I know you base most of your argument on 4 flights and a couple of hundred people in total. But, that's hardly enough data points to draw any sort of quantitative and defendable comparison.