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.

No more speculation than a FAM would respond better. I personally think I would respond better than a FAM since I have no one to answer to. How many FAM's have killed a man? All the range training in the world can't help you there. And I had better be right since a very few percentage of flights in the world have FAM's.

As for how Europe is reacting better to post-9/11, see here...

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=353371

The only reason they worked is because people cooperated with terrorists and pilots opened the cockpit doors. Broken wine bottles/glasses would have worked equally as well, as would have martial arts. Now, no one will cooperate with terrorists and the cockpit door will remain closed. Ergo, the continued Great Sharp and Pointy Object Search is an utter waste of time and resources.

There have still been no terrorists arrested because they were carrying guns.

Every dollar wasted on the "avoidance" of things that pose very little actual risk is a dollar that could have been spent providing real security.

Well, his data is pretty instructive to me, seeing how it was adapted by the military itself and training regimens adpoted across the board (pop-up targets, stress training, silhoutte targets, etc) in military and LE circles and the results speak for themselves.

I also base my argument on other events (Russian school incident, for incidence) where they outcome is equally pre-ordained (ie-the hostages are pretty sure they will die) and still do nothing. My argument is also based upon a decade and a half of training, observation and work in the field of human violence, having seen the elephant myself.

Of course my argument is much more "quantitative and defendable" than yours, in that yours has happened only one time in recent history and we have several incidents where they did not fight back.

I do hope I am wrong, but the evidence to date does not give me hope.

Hi Bart,

What do you mean by "handled discreetly in private screening"? Do you envision all of these women having to strip to their undergarments in the presence of screeners? What about billowy skirts? Should women have to remove those too? Why exactly does the TSA make any distinction between outer garments and regular garments? I have plenty of outer garments which are tightly fitted and plenty of regular garments that are blousy, billowy, et cetera and could conceal large volumes of material. It seems a distinction without a difference.

When you suggest investigating "bulges" that seems to imply we will have to wear form-fitting clothes exclusively at a checkpoint, because that's the only way you're going to notice bulges. Most people dress specifically to hide their personal bulges.

Why is ETD screening of bodies impractical? I thought puff-of-air detectors qualified as ETD screening of bodies?

The FAMs have a ton of training that you do not have and the overwhelming majority have years of experience in the field and with violence. What training have you had? When was the last time someone tried to kill you? When was the last shooting/stabbing/assault you were in? You think the HR guy in 2E that had 3 Bloody Mary's and is asleep with his shoes off is the better choice...? Not moi.....

So let any knife on then? And we have discussed 9/11 before. People should have stopped "cooperating" after it became apparent what was happening. All evidence points that it did not until United 93.

Martial arts will lose to an edged weapon almost every time, and I say that as a 15 year experienced MA (muy thai, BJJ, JKD).

That you know of. I know of none either, but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened. Nor does it mean that they haven't been deterred by extra security. It is impossible to prove a negative.

You can spend years and millions of dollars training farm animals to dance, but that doesn't make them Fred Astaire. On top of that the violations that we've heard about show us that these guys are not quite all the "best of the best". Sleeping on the job was one violation pointed out in the IG report. I'm sure that many if not most of them are really really good at what they do, but not all.

Actually I have a fair amount of experience in violent crowd control so I'm sure of how I will react. And yes many passengers will not be in shape or have the will to act. But I believe that enough will on most any flight in the world. That's why I haven't been afraid at all to fly after 9/11.

No, we didn't (knowingly) let Bowie knives on board pre-9/11. But it's ridiculous to not allow tiny knives, cuticle scissors and other small objects. Yes you could possibly slit one throat with scissors, but no way could you take over a plane anymore. That attack is gone forever.

Yet you could walk into any crowded narrow bar and kill several people with a small knife before you were restrained. Should we ban all sharp objects from public places? Should we all live in rubber rooms so we won't hurt ourselves?

I agree with eliminating the silly articles you mention. But you still need to screen for edged weapons of merit.

And as for "gone forever" you are speculating.

And there is a distinct difference between killing a lot of people on a plane in a terroristic attack than killing twice as many in a bar. That is why one is a national security item and one is not, merely tragic.

You have to approach this from a broad perspective and put figures in context. Obviously, you have your experience base which sounds like it's on the pointy end of the spear. That's fine for one-on-one engagements with a bad guy. But, any military planner (including this one) will tell you that one-on-one engagements (soldier-soldier, aircraft-aircraft, ship-ship) is an incredibly inefficient means to prevail in combat. It's all about doctrine and how to employ it.... factors such as mass, concentration of firepower, element of surprise, etc. By the time you get to shooting pop-up targets and executing your capture of the bad guy, all of this has been thought out and tested in simulations and in realistic scenarios and updated as a result of real-world experience...hence my previous comments on various threads about fighting the next war rather than the last one.

You're obviously passionate about your profession and your ability to protect & serve. Most people, I would assume, are grateful. However, don't discount for a nanosecond the ability for the untrained person to do extraordinary things -- even without any formal training. The people on Flight 93, in the 25 minutes before they acted, needed to sort through all of the doctrine and tactics military and police forces take decades to develop and refine. From all accounts, it appears that they effectively executed a couple of the doctrinal fundamentals: element of surprise and concentration of firepower.

On the other hand, a couple of highly-trained FAMs armed to the teeth are no match for an adversary who effectively employs some of the elements of doctrine I noted above.

I won't get into a further discussion about defendable arguments. Our experience bases put us light-years apart on the subject.

Not attempting to answer for TSA here, but my suspicion is that there are no privacy-friendly ways to resolve alarms.

The lawyers and the public probably won't tolerate body cavity searches (rightly so) of 85-year-old women, 3-year-old children, and in general innocent US citizens who happen to have used the wrong kind of lotion that day. And from a risk-avoidance and CYA standpoint, it's better to not detect the explosive than to detect it with an ETD and fail to stop it.

All you have written above is true. But is not any terrorist incident a one-on-one, or force-on-force engagement? Is that not what we are discussing?

I don't discount anything. I just don't COUNT on it. I applaud and deeply respect Flight 93 and what they did. I just state that we must know the nature of the problem and not delude ourselves that this "fighting back" is an assured event when it is not. Any person that is in a hijacking today or tomorrow will have to sort through the same data. They only difference between now and on 9/11 on United 93 is that the data has had time to penetrate. The overwhelming effects of adrenaline are still the same. The debilitating fear, nausea, avoidance (this is not really happening, etc.) still remain. THAT is what training does-minimize that.

We abandoned civilian militias because professional military is demonstrable superior. This is the concept I am addressing here.

True (assuming the FAMs do not possess those elements, which is arguable), but I give them a better chance than the untrained civilian who has not been in a fight since the 3rd grade. I hope then, when the FAMs are dead and so are some of the bad guys that the rest of the pax will jump up and finish the job. Leadership is what is necessary, and I am afraid that the first UNARMED leader to jump up will be brutally killed by the terrorists to set the example and cower the rest.

Too bad. I loved the exchange. Thanks.

Tell you what.. how about 100 men armed with knives versus 100 men with broken wine bottles?

See my point?

There are about 36,000 police officers in NYPD. How many have killed a man? Percentage wise not many. Does that make the rest of the trained police officers any less of an officer? No. How many people walk by a crime in progress? Many, they don't want to get involved. How many would be the first to jump in? Not many. I have been to too many scenes where a women was robbed and beat up in a street full of people and not one person helped.

If you are going to stand up against a group of hi-jackers make sure someone else stands up with you or you will be the sacrificial lamb.

How about a small, highly trained and motivated group who knew they were going to die the morning they woke up against a bunch of people who are heading to a city for business or leisure?

But to answer your scenario, knife beats broken bottle.

Stimpy, you're right. They weren't green berets as we know green berets. But, they were Al Qaeda's version of such. Keep in mind that there was an Israeli soldier on one of the 9-11 flights. When the FA's started getting cut, he jumped up. He also got dead when the guys waiting for him to jump up slashed him from behind. I admire your will to fight, but please be more realistic. I think you need some more exposure to violence in order to speak authoritatively on the matter. Thank you again for your will. Now, train your body and your mind to keep up with it.

Did 1905 people get arrested ?
 

I do not understand why people who bring guns to airports (without proper documentation) are not arrested on the spot and taken to jail ? I am referrringto those who brought guns to the airport.

Not really, there have been four cases in which unruly passengers have been subdued by other passengers since 9/11. They all resulted in deaths to the passenger that was freaking out and all but one have been ruled justifiable homicide.

edit for typo

Really? I'll pose the same question to you as I did to someone in another thread:

Ok, I'm going to interject some reality here. Your numbers and idea of a likely hijacking scenario are way off. Here is a more likely scenario as evidenced by current data:

Your number of 10 is pretty close. Ten hijackers that is. They will all be armed. Let's say two with handguns and eight with edged weapons. They are well trained, highly disciplined, martyrs in the making. They know they are going to die in the next 30 minutes. You, on the other hand, are watching another re-run on the video monitor. All of the sudden 10 men simultaneously stand up and kill the person sitting next to them and dump their bodies in the aisle. Four of them rush the flight deck, and six of them position themselves at the front of the plane. That took about 10 seconds, max. A passenger gets up from his seat in protest, BANG! he gets killed where he stands. You have 18" of bloody aisle and 10 dead bodies to negotiate before you can one-by-one engage the hijackers.

What will you do??? How many passengers are going to try and re-take the aircraft?? Are you willing to be first??

"Unruly passenger" does not equal "terroristic hijacking with violent deaths". World of difference.