Eric’s Grumbles Before the Grave has this really good criticism of the Transportation Security Agency’s handling of air travel security.
A few choice excerpts:
As far as I can tell, from the outside looking in, the TSA has not done the basics needed for a truly effective security program. Rather than identifying threat and vulnerability pairs, determining risks, and level of risk, they have rushed from one politically visible issue to another.
The US Government actually has a world class security framework and methodology established by the National Institute of Standards & Technology’s Computer Security Division. Even more to the point, the military has been providing physical security quite successfully for a long time now. Either the DoD or NIST security framework would provide the foundation, in procedures, standards and policies, needed to build an effective security framework.
TSA is, in essence, a huge waste of time and money. Airplane security was all but assured, from a hijacking perspective, once security doors were installed on airplane cockpits. From an explosives perspective is entirely a different story.
One of the things that makes clear the issues with the TSA, and Homeland Security more generally, is that there are no well known security experts who have worked with, or for, them. Both the well known, and less well known, security experts have very little respect for TSA[…]I know a lot of really competent security folks who have no desire to work for TSA or Homeland Security.
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