TSA Inspections Are Still A Farce

from the security-theater dept

If you thought taking your shoes off and putting your liquids in little plastic bags was going to stop terrorists from smuggling bombs onto planes, think again. A new report from the Government Accountability Office finds that investigators were able to smuggle bomb components through TSA checkpoints without being caught. This isn't much of a surprise; a similar test last year found that the TSA caught only 2 out of 22 people who tried to smuggle dummy weapons through checkpoints in a Newark airport. This is not really surprising. The TSA's strategy has been basically reactive: the 9/11 hijackers used box cutters, so those get banned. Somebody tries to smuggle explosives onboard in his shoes, so the TSA makes us all take our shoes off. Somebody tries to smuggle liquid explosives onto a plane, so the TSA bans bottled water. There's no reason to think these rules actually make us safer, but they do allow the TSA to pretend they're "doing something" about terrorism. A TSA spokeswoman insists that this wasn't a fair test because they only got by one of their "19 layers of security." I wouldn't be surprised if the other 18 layers were as ineffectual than the others, but one thing that can be said for them is that they're a lot less annoying for travelers. How about if the TSA stops wasting resources forcing 5-year-old girls to take their shoes off, and shift those resources to the sort of in-depth police work that led to the foiling of last year's liquid explosives plot.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Feds' Edict To Encrypt Hard Drives Gets -- You Guessed It -- Ignored

from the surprise! dept

Back in May, the Transportation Security Administration did its best to gloss over the fact that it lost a hard drive containing personal information on some 100,000 of its employees by putting out a press release about it at 7 o'clock on a Friday evening. Now, a few months later, it's disclosed that the drive wasn't encrypted (via Threat Level), in contravention of a White House order from last summer saying that all devices containing personal data need to be encrypted if they're taken outside secure areas. As we've noted, these sorts of edicts and guidelines are meaningless unless they're actually followed, and non-compliance brings real repercussions.

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