A glaring spotlight shone on airport security over the Thanksgiving holiday as the controversy over the use of Advanced Imaging Technology, fueled by massive media coverage, reached an almost frenzied peak. The hullabaloo had some legislators calling for re-evaluation of the use of AIT and prompted TSA administrator John Pistole to defend its use.
Pistole says the TSA is working to making screening procedure “as minimally invasive as possible while still providing the security that the American people want and deserve.” He adds that there is “a continual process of refinement and adjustment” with feedback from the public taken into account. The AIT issue propelled the issue of airport security to the forefront, but at least one influential lawmaker says the use of imaging technology isn’t the crux of the problem with the TSA. U.S. Congressman John Mica, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, is urging airports to opt for private security screening.
In a letter dated Nov. 5 and sent to directors and board members at the nation’s 100 largest airports, Mica offered the assistance of Aviation Subcommittee staff to assist any airport that opts for a certified private screening program.
“It is my intention to assist airports in converting to this screening program in order to reform and institute better, more efficient and more effective screening operations,” Mica said in the letter.
Mica was one of the authors of the Aviation and Transportation Security Act that created the TSA, but he claims the agency has grown far larger than originally planned.
“When the TSA was established, it was never envisioned that it would become a huge, unwieldy bureaucracy which was soon to grow to 67,000 employees,” Mica said in the letter. “As TSA has grown larger, more impersonal and administratively top-heavy, I believe it is important that airports across the country consider utilizing the opt-out provision provided by law.”
Justin Harclerode, communications director for the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Republicans, says the timing of the letter, sent just prior to the media flap over screening procedures, was purely coincidental. In fact, Mica’s issue is not with the full-body screening, although Harclerode says that “he feels that the use of them is more warranted as a means of secondary screening for resolving alarms or for scanning for someone who has, either through behavior detection or something else, raised concern.”
Instead, Mica objects to the “massive bureaucracy” that TSA has become, Harclerode says. Earlier this year, Mica called for reorganization of the TSA in the wake of the Government Accountability Office report slamming the implementation of the TSA’s behavior detection program, known as SPOT, or Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques. The report said the TSA spends hundreds of millions of dollars annually on the SPOT program but never scientifically validated the list of behaviors underpinning the program, never determined whether the techniques could be applied for counterterrorism or in an airport environment, and never conducted a cost-benefit analysis. The report questioned the efficacy of SPOT, saying that although 150,000 passengers in a four-year period were selected for secondary screening under the SPOT program, just 1,100 were arrested and none was arrested for terrorism.
Harclerode says some airports are responding to Mica’s suggestion and are at least considering private security screening.
“There is certainly interest in finding out more about the program,” he says. “Some airports have contacted us, and some airports are contacting other airports that are already in the program.”
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