Letter From a Passenger: “What Really Happens in the TSA Private Room?”

GFTB asks:

“Tell us, please, what really happens in that private room and why the TSA does not want it seen in public nor recorded.”

Dear GFTB,

I can only speak from my personal experience on this blog, as well as from second hand accounts from screeners I knew in my time at the TSA; screeners whose stories I consider to be quite credible, from many different angles. Though there are many claims in the news about outrageous things happening in the private screening rooms (such as this one last year) I’ve never seen or even heard of anything malicious, illicit or illegal happening in the private screening room, depending, at least, upon what one’s personal definition of “illegal” may be, per the Fourth Amendment, in regards to TSA policy in general (and yes, I’m familiar with U.S. vs Davis 1973 for you TSA apologists reading this, your perennial go-to rejoinder). The reason the TSA generally wants to shield the “enhanced security screening procedures” that transpire in the private screening room is because, of course, if the ever-present, ever-lurking, American-way-of-life threatening terrorists out there were to ever get the specifics on those state of the art procedures, then why, by God, they would possess the very key to defeating TSA’s highly-sophisticated, multi-layered anti-terrorism defenses! Great googly moogly! We would all be in grave danger! And it’s not like the passenger could immediately leave the private room and, say, just tell everyone the specifics of the private screening procedures.

Sometimes passengers request a private screening, so in all fairness, the TSA is sometimes actually accommodating the passenger’s wishes.

All in all, though, the TSA has a decent system in place for private screening, where two officers must be present, and passengers are given the option to bring their own witness in, as well. This means that if a screener were to have any unlawful plans for that private screening room, it would require the other screener to be absolutely complicit in the plan, as well. And we all know the saying about what it takes for 2 people to keep a secret (one of them must be dead). This system of TSA’s does in fact limit the opportunities for bad actors to carry out any naughty deeds in a private screening room, especially with the unpredictability factor of a passenger requesting a third party witness.

Now, the I.O. Room (the image operator room, where your nude images are viewed at airports that still use the backscatter x-ray full body scanners), that, my friend, is a whole different story. In the image analysis room, no one is permitted to leave or enter without ample warning (part of TSA’s promise to the public that officers “would never see the passenger whose nude image they just viewed,” although I did occasionally witness this being violated, see Confession #1) and, like the private screening room, recording devices of any kind are prohibited. So in summation: what you have are one to two to three TSA officers locked in a room, viewing nude passenger images, with a guarantee that no one can barge in on them, and that no surveillance cameras can legally be present.

Just use your imagination on the stories among TSA officers of what has gone on in the I.O. room.

Personally, in the I.O. room, I witnessed light sexual play among officers, a lot of e-cigarette vaping, and a whole lot of officers laughing and clowning in regard to some of your nude images,  dear passengers.  Things like this are what happen (at the very least) when you put people who are often fresh out of high school or a GED program (although there are actually a few TSA screeners with PhDs, which I guess is sad on so, so many levels) with minimal training and even less professionalism, into the position of being in charge of analyzing nude images of people in a hermetically sealed room.

The most ridiculous thing is that these I.O. rooms even exist, to begin with. The backscatter machines are useless, as I and many, many others have previously pointed out. They should never have been put into use to begin with; TSA officers should never have been viewing nude, radiation-rendered images of passengers in those private rooms, period. That’s why there are federal lawsuits pending against TSA (Ralph Nader, Bruce Schneier, et al) and why TSA is trying to backpedal and sweep the radiation scanners under the rug away from oversight committees and the public at large, as quickly as possible, right now. The entire thing was, as usual, a hare-brained, tax payer money-wasting,  disaster of an idea.

And I’ll leave it that.

Hope that helps,

-NJR

Email all questions to takingsenseaway@gmail.com. I’ll do my best to answer them.

Confession #4 : In Memory of Snow Globes Lost (and of All the Idiotic TSA Rules I Refused to Follow)

Had the terrorists won at this point? Yes. Along with prehistoric logic.

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It’s holiday season, dear passengers, and for once, recently, the TSA gave you what is hands down the most heart-warming gift I have ever seen it hand out, though you may not have noticed: as of this last September, snow globes ceased to be automatically confiscated on behalf of the ongoing airport-security-theater war on terror. Only snow globes “bigger than a tennis ball” will be confiscated from you now. Blogger Bob, my insufferably annoying, mediocrity-of-a-counterpart over at the official TSA blog, will probably trumpet this generous concession to the American people soon, if he hasn’t already.

The entire ban on snow globes was just another of the many intelligence-insulting rules that I was often forced to follow during my time at TSA. Imagine having to look, year after year, into the faces of innocent children and tell them and their parents that their Pretty-Princess-in-a-Blizzard snow globe has to go into the trash. “But why,” little Angie would ask, puppy dog pouting, tears trembling.

Because there are people out there trying to terrorize you, little Angie, and in order to counter that, I have to tear this pretty princess snow globe from your little hands and toss it in the trash.

The really ridiculous thing is that for most of the years that I was supposed to be confiscating snow globes from people, we actually had the means to test them right there on the checkpoint– multispectrum electromagnetic analyzers, for example– which are fully capable of testing the liquids inside a snow globe. In case you’re not following closely because TSA terminology bores you into a deep coma as it did to me for nearly 7 years:

Taxpayers had paid for advanced machines that were capable of testing liquids in containers such as those of snow globes, and at the same time, were having their snow globes tossed out without the common sense benefit of the very same machines that their money had purchased in order to test the public’s liquids.

Stupid-storms such as this, straight out of a Joseph Heller novel, are business-as-usual when you work as a TSA officer, let me tell you.

The TSA is still doing this, throwing out all sorts of liquids that could easily be tested with the machines your tax dollars bought. Now here’s the TSA’s comeback for that (trust me, I’ve heard it a million times):

“But if we tested every liquid, the wait times would be catastrophic. There’s no way we could guarantee safety from terror if we tried to test every liquid, and the lines would run out the door.”

Hey, TSA, did you ever think of this?:

You don’t have to test everything. There’s no way to guarantee freedom from El Terror in this world, and no policy of yours will much affect things one way or the other, ever. Adequate deterrence is all you need in order to counter this threat that is statistically nearly-non-existent for all intents and purposes, anyway. If a potential terrorist knows that there is even a 1 in 500 chance that their already-risky proposition of a homemade liquids-based bomb will be detected by a random liquids test, they’ll go ahead and hit a mall instead. You only need to randomly test the liquids. Lift the idiotic liquids restriction already.

Good God. Let people have their goddamned peanut butter and bottled water.

I apologize. You have no idea how much aggravation that imbecilic liquids rule caused me over the years, along with many others. Now that I’m worked up, here’s a confession:

Whenever possible, dear passengers, I was the TSA employee who allowed your snow globes to go through the checkpoint. I refused to comply with that idiotic rule. Oh, I sized each situation up, got a feel for the passenger, the proximity of any anal retentive supervisors supervisors— in other words, I used common sense—but whenever I felt the situation was appropriate, I slipped people’s snow globes back in their luggage and told them to be on their way.

Viva la resistance, I whispered to you, tucking your snow globe back into your kid’s backpack, right where God and Thomas Jefferson intended it.*

There have been many soul-destroyingly stupid rules at the TSA that I’ve disregarded, with common sense as my guide, most of which ended up being, or will end up being, discarded as rules by the TSA themselves (as you can see by looking at the history of their policies, the TSA always lags far behind on the common sense curve.)

In my time at TSA, I secretly refused to follow:

-The ban on printer cartridges. I was not going to force some lady from Yonkers to surrender her printer because one idiot in Yemen tossed out a half-assed plot to mess with commercial shipping.

-The directive, at first, to place everyone, including toddlers, into the full body radiation scanners. You should have seen it for the first couple years (you probably did see it), the most shameful period working at TSA for me, when 3 year olds were made to assume the position and take radiation doses in the name of freedom. It made me sick, sitting in our I.O. room (Image Operator room, where we viewed those images) having to analyze nude images of what were obviously toddlers. I mostly just instantly cleared those images, and when it came time for me to direct the kids into the backscatter machines, I almost always found a way to exempt them. (One young female officer I remember had an adamant zeal about making sure no one allowed toddlers to avoid being placed in the imagers. She went so far as to report officers to superiors if she witnessed any such slackening of the rules for toddlers. Remembering the fanatical glare in that female officer’s eyes as she insisted that the rules said that no one—not even toddlers—were exempt from the nude radiation scan still sends chills down my spine, and I will permit myself to make a comparison that I will rarely make on this blog now, that of what it must have felt like to work side-by-side with German officers in 1939, as someone who doubted the morality of the mission.)

You could visually clear this kid and his mother of being terror-strapped in 5 seconds. It takes the TSA approximately 5 years.

-The rule that pilot’s Swiss army knives must be confiscated. As you may have noticed by now from my previous posts, this rule really got to me. It is an affront to the very ideals of the Enlightenment, to look the pilot of a commercial aircraft in the eyes, holding the tiny Swiss army knife that his grandfather had given him when he was a little boy, and which had passed through security countless times before, and explain to him that because the x-ray operator decided to call a bag check on it today, the knife has to go into the garbage, in the name of making the very airways he is about to navigate safer. If anything, you make it more likely that the pilot will turn the plane back around in a rage and take the entire airport out.

It exhausts me, thinking back on all the mind-meltingly dumb rules I had to follow, and— whenever possible, break— in the name of the common sense this great nation is so often lacking in these post 9/11 days, so I will leave it here, and say a prayer tonight for safe passage of that jar of homemade apple butter that your grandma slipped into your carry on unbeknownst to you.

-N.J.R

*I have no proof of Thomas Jefferson’s position on the 3-1-1 rule, or on snow globes being allowed through airport checkpoints. But of God’s opinion on the matter, there can be no doubt.

Plots We Imagine the TSA Protected Us From Today: The iPad Plot.

PLOT #1: THE iPAD PLOT.

Details of Plot Sent in by:
A. Terrorist

Dear TSA,

As-salamu alaykum. I don’t believe any further introduction is necessary, but just in case you’re not in razor-sharp airport security form today:

I am, quite frankly, a terrorist. Just one of the many terrorists that you so courageously and effectively deter in your day-to-day advanced counter terrorist mission at the airport.

Today I write to you in order to tell you that you shall never be forgiven for your latest upset of our plans. Allow me to give you some background, which you probably do not need, given your superlative intelligence gathering capabilities, but still.

The iPad plot that my brothers and I had so meticulously crafted over the past year and attempted, several times, to put into motion,  was multi-tiered, very complex; so ingenious as never to be anticipated. So crazy…that it might have just worked.

We infiltrated your very organization, TSA—along with several key news outlet staff members, and a few iPad owning citizens. We, the terrorists, were planning to attempt to take down a plane using an iPad stuffed with 512 grams of PETN. We planned to smuggle the iPad through your dauntingly effective security under the pretense that we were setting up your screeners in a sort of sting operation. Surely, we believed, the TSA screeners would never suspect our plot; they would go about their usual day-to-day business of not stealing from the public and honorably upholding their duties as Federal employees sworn to defend the safety of the American citizens. The plan was perfect. If one of our operatives— posing as internal affairs investigators, ABC News reporters attempting to score an expose on thievery at the airport, and common citizens going through the checkpoint hoping that their iPads would not be stolen— were caught attempting to smuggle the iPad bomb through the checkpoint, then they would be able to claim that it was all just a test, and that the TSA had passed. But if, as we were sure would be the case, things went according to plan, the TSA agents would allow the iPads to go through their security unmolested, allowing us to rain terror down upon the infidels.

Imagine, then, our dismay, when your heroic TSA agents began foiling our plans, time after time! Selflessly taking our iPads HOME WITH THEM, risking life and limb in their quest to save the world from our terror!

The American public, in an ironic twist, actually believed these heroic TSA screeners to be CRIMINALS! They arrested them and splashed their pictures all over the front pages of newspapers as having been “caught in the act.” With all those news cameras and police around, we had no choice but to abort the mission every time. How your cunning TSA agents sniffed out our plot and came to the snap decision to take the iPad bombs home with them in order to defuse them in a controlled setting, is beyond us.

Let it suffice to say that our scheme would have worked, had it not been for your elite counter terrorism agents, throwing their blasted wrenches into our plans. The face of the cause of our latest defeat looks like this:

Damn this super sleuth!

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You may have won the battle, TSA, but the war is not yet over. Next up is our Rolex bomb, which, surely, your screeners will not attempt to heroically take home with them.

Wishing you the worst, (Allahu Akbar),

-A. Terrorist

Hate Mail, Part 1: Wherein I Am Called a Traitor.

Well, it’s happened. I got my first piece of hate mail the other day. Actually, my second, but the first was nearly unintelligible. This is the first coherent piece of hate mail, sent by an anonymous person, who I think it’s fair to say works for a certain agency.

“Dear traitor,

Why don’t you tell the people reading your site about the pension you’ll be getting when you reach retirement? You were with TSA for 7 years, right? That means you’ll be getting a small pension, and you know it. Tell us: since you are so critical of the TSA’s policies, are you going to refuse the retirement benefits on principle, too?

And one last thing: do you really think that the Federal government doesn’t already know who you are, genius? Take a look at the bottom of your computer. See that? It’s called an IP NUMBER and the government keeps a database of all of them. You’re probably already on some watch list.

Nice job, asshole.”

Well, well, well, looks like we got ourselves a live one here. First of all, I am not critical and caustic toward all the TSA’s policies; just the extremely dumb ones. Yes, I was told by the guy in HR as I dropped off my uniform that I would qualify for some kind of pension, but that wouldn’t be for at least another 40 years, and who knows, then. Second, the pension the TSA gives its employees at five (or 3) years would come to about 20 bucks a month, in my case. I am going to give that much away each month for the next year when I host my monthly Plots We Imagine TSA Saved Us From Today contests. So it all comes out even.

On a final note, dear anon, I have to say I am worried about your conception of internet and computer things, especially concerning “IP Numbers.” I think you’re conflating “IP addresses” with “serial numbers.” But please write back if you have any inside information concerning the TSA attempting to confiscate people’s IP addresses in the name of the Old Airport Terror Fight.

Wishing you the best,

N.J.R.

Send all hate mail to takingsenseaway@gmail.com.

Letter From a Passenger: Did You Ever See Retaliation Against Passengers Who Opt Out?

Jennifer from Columbus asks:

“I always opt out of the full body scanners, and I sometimes feel as though the TSA screeners are sort of punishing me for it, like taking their sweet time with everything to purposely try to make me miss my flight, or something. In your years at the TSA, did you ever see anything like this?”

Dear Jennifer,

The TSA is, in my experience, generally short-staffed on females. Some praise must be given to the females who actually work hard at TSA, because a lot of burden falls on their shoulders. TSA has trouble retaining female officers. So some of what you experience may be related to a lack of female officers on the floor.

That being said: of course I’ve seen officers retaliate for all sorts of things they didn’t like from a passenger. There are an endless number of subtle, passive aggressive ways for an officer to get back at you if they decide they don’t like you. The most sure-fire way is a sudden shift from a practical procedural style to a strict, by-the-SOP style, which basically translates to them going from using common sense to a brittle, strict interpretation of the TSA SOP, which by nature means that everything will take much longer, be absurd and highly irritating, which is basically the TSA’s specialty.

So for instance, say you opt out of the full body scanner, and the officer patting you down doesn’t like your attitude, for whatever reason. She shoots a glance to the x-ray operator, who then calls a bogus bag check (see The Insider’s TSA Dictionary) on your bag, passing word to the bag checker, who then decides that he or she is going to tear apart your entire bag on account of some harmless item, pretending that he or she has some serious concern about the bag and is therefore going above and beyond for the love of country and the war on airport terror and bottles of soda. After going through all this hoohah, the dullard-of-an-officer may then come across, say, a travel size bottle of shampoo, and so then, lo and behold! He or she “has” to run your bag through the x-ray again on account of this new information!

Pull up a chair, passenger, this is going to be a while, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

In defense of the good officers out there, though, sometimes there are passengers who are just all-out insufferable and entirely unreasonable. It’s like any service-type job. If you walk into a restaurant tossing racial and misogynistic jokes at the waits staff, then walk in again the next week, do not expect your soup to be pure, so to speak. Some passengers walk to the checkpoint looking to pick a fight even before the TSA has done anything absurd and infuriating to them, which isn’t the best way to go, as there actually are a lot of good officers out there working the checkpoints.

Hope that helps,

-N.J.R

Send all questions to takingsenseaway@gmail.com

Confession #2: In Defense of the Good TSA Screener, and Some Reasons Why You May See Officers Unfriendly.

TSA does not set itself up to be the kind of place where good, smart workers even think about staying. There are several reasons for the high turnover rate, as well as the high retention rate of the bad apples that the current chief, John Pistole, so often speaks disdainfully of. I cannot emphasize enough my belief that the most fundamental, deeply rooted problem with this vast, expensive, bumbling organization lies within its very premise: its mission to be a highly advanced, effective counter-terrorist organization, when the one thing it will never be is a highly effective, advanced counter-terrorist organization.

The most ridiculous fact is not that the TSA is trying to be this “advanced counter-terrorist organization” in a world where, for the most part, the mere arrival of a terrorist at a crowded transportation hub is already fatal. The unfortunate truth is that if a malicious entity again managed to evade our real intelligence and police agencies and bowl right over the security-theater installed at our airports, we would most likely blame the TSA for not having been more intrusive with their procedures. Passive security such as TSA’s can only do so much (outside of Israel, anyway) setting up what amounts to Maginot Lines that the (exceedingly rare) deadly terrorist can simply opt out of, slip through, or walk right around, with only a little determination and ingenuity.

The good, thinking TSA employee, a few of whom I knew personally, is aware of this damned if you do, damned if you don’t position, and realizes that the best option is to put on the show, officially, but try to do his or her best to drop the magic act for as many people as possible, wherever possible, so long as they don’t get caught betraying this or that specific security theater routine as being just theater, thus outing the “man behind the curtain” and bringing on disciplinary action. And so you have a system where, in actuality, the absolute value of a TSO PAX screener is directly proportional to his or her willingness to break the TSA’s own rules in a non-malicious, non-coercive manner.

The biggest thing that the TSA could do to partially reshape this awkward dynamic that exists within its culture, one where theatrics and illusion are so deeply ingrained and thoroughly rewarded on one hand, and discreetly expected to be done away with at times on the other— an absurd, tension-fraught dynamic that does indeed lower morale and make its precious few good, intelligent front-line screeners far more likely to quit, run to new jobs, or be unfairly removed from service— would be to revamp their yearly assessment system.

As it is, any passenger TSO can keep his or her job so long as they 1. Don’t get caught doing something absurdly stupid and 2. Pass a one hour theatrical routine which takes place annually, the PSE, or “practicals.” That’s about it. A TSA employee can be the most unfriendly, common sense-deficient, uneducated and unskilled person in the world, who consistently does just enough to not get fired all year round, but as long as he or she pulls it together to pass an annual one hour song-and-dance routine, displaying an ability to deliver an on-the-spot performance containing only a superficial connection to a screener’s day-to-day functional duties, they can keep their jobs. While, conversely, it oftentimes happens that a good TSO, of the kind-hearted, pleasant, intelligent variety who leaves passengers smiling while still getting the job done, constantly finds him or herself in danger of being terminated for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they are good all-around employees. I’ve watched many of those good TSA employees get needlessly terminated, in fact, which is one of the main reasons I write this blog: for all the good employees that TSA kicked to the street by its characteristically moronic reasoning. Many of them do find themselves terminated for outrageous reasons (example: “Did you clear the inside meshing of the third pocket of that test suitcase with a patting motion or a sliding motion? Wrong. You fail. Thanks for your 10 years of quality federal service, but you’re fired. A thief will now be taking your place.”)

A more reasonable assessment could be devised, if the fire was lit beneath this enormous bureaucracy whose hands are always supposedly tied; a more holistic assessment of officers. Instead of, for instance, funneling all the time and money that the TSA wastes in their pointless quest to make full body scanners the primary screening method, training and deploying teams of “truth wizards” (Behavior Detection Officers) to patrol airports, and setting up assessment systems that hardly reflect upon their officers’ suitability—esoteric SOP multiple choice tests and purely theoretical one hour performances– a robust covert passenger-officer interaction program could be implemented at airports, something that would include what senator Charles Schumer recently proposed, designed to assess officers on their people skills with members of the public, their trustworthiness, along with their basic procedural competence, in a way that actually reflects on their routine, day-to-day performance as a screener, even when “no one is looking.” This would do two main things. 1. Give PAX screeners a better incentive to be on the same page with all procedures, year-round, as opposed to just once or twice during the year and whenever certain supervisors are looking and 2. Give officers a greater incentive to treat all passengers with respect, as there would be a more palpable chance that any given passenger could be the one determining their job security.

While some degree of security theater is probably a necessary evil in a world where the TSA will ultimately and inevitably be impotent to do anything to stop a determined terrorist, the TSA could at least counterbalance that by doing a much better job of optimizing what they can actually do: provide the least intrusive, least obnoxious and least intelligence-insulting security theater possible, while genuinely making every effort to keep the “good apple employees” in, and the bad ones out.

When questioned about the TSA’s questionable method of yearly assessment and decision-making for recertification (and TSOs are, justifiably, constantly questioning the assessments) I’ve heard many a member of upper management say, in conspiratorial tones, “Don’t complain about our assessment system. Keep your mouths shut. If you know how to work it to your advantage, you can come out far better with this system than with the theoretical, well-rounded system that all of you are always asking for. Be careful what you wish for.”

What TSOs, and what the public would demand if they realized the extent of the absurdity of the PASS system, as TSA calls it, is not a system where people who are adept at gaming the system are rewarded, and genuinely good workers are tossed out without jobs. The TSA may be in a position where it has to do a certain amount of theater, but it can see to it that the actors in the play do not descend into the audience and sneak lewd peeks at them, confiscate their liquids for no good reason, and run off the few perfectly good members of their show’s production for the crime of forgetting a few of the play’s lines once a year.

TSA, tear down that PASS system.

—

I’m on Twitter here.

Confession #1: All the Airport’s a Security Stage.

I would have been terminated once they’d found out about this site.

As soon as they’d tracked down my identity, the wheels of the TSA bureaucracy would have groaned into motion in order to eject the outspoken employee in their midst. I would have been walked out by a TSA suit with a smug look on his face as he solemnly demanded I turn over my badge

So it’s a good thing I recently resigned.

I don’t intend to remain anonymous for too long, anyway, so I’m sure I’ll be blackballed from DHS employment for life, which is fine with me. TSA’s annually-required reading of the Employee Rules of Conduct makes it clear that it is forbidden for TSA employees to bring shame or embarrassment upon the Transportation Security Administration. But, honestly? What embarrassment could anyone bring upon them that they haven’t already brought upon themselves. I assure you, the most controversial things on this blog will invariably be matters of public concern.

This month marks the beginning of federal fiscal year 2013, which will include another 8 billion dollar allocation of tax payer money to the Transportation Security Administration in their mission to keep America safe from the “existential threat of terrorism.” Having been employed by the Transportation Security Administration for seven years, working passenger screening at a fairly large airport on the East Coast, I feel I am in a good position to comment upon matters concerning the TSA’s use of taxpayers’ money. I have absolutely no personal grudge against the TSA. I resigned on good terms with the agency in order to pursue a new career. It’s just that, as any officer on the checkpoint will tell you, and as several officers at our Logan International recently expressed to the tune of the front page of the New York Times , there are a lot of absurd and, occasionally, egregious things going on at the TSA at any given time.

The full body scanners, the racial profiling by TSA officers at Logan International, and stories of criminal behavior among bad apple TSA employees have been all the talk lately. I will come to the behavior detection program soon, and the bad apple employees in another post, but for now, having operated the full body scanners for 3 years, I can vouch for the ineffectiveness of the full body scanners— the backscatter iterations, especially.

Recently, a blogger named Jonathan Corbett released a video proving that anyone can easily bypass the billion dollar full body scanner technology, filming himself repeatedly passing through the scanners with a medium-sized metal object; the equivalent, for all intents and purposes, of a gun. He provided proof to the public that the machines can easily be rendered useless by exploiting a laughable weakness in the technology. The video went viral, and the TSA downplayed the video’s significance.

But I believe it is of public concern , especially to those party to the federal lawsuits pending against the full body imagers (Ralph Nader, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Bruce Schneier et al, all of whom– along with the American Civil Liberties Union– have been informed of this blog’s existence as well as of my true identity), and to the taxpayers who both fund the purchase of these machines while simultaneously being compelled to submit to their use, that both Corbett and EPIC’s claims are absolutely correct, despite the TSA’s assertion otherwise.

The backscatter radiation machines are not only ineffective and of questionable security value, they are absolutely useless, and represent an unnecessary impingement upon people’s privacy.

Furthermore, the TSA clumsily attempted to cover up the critical flaw in its scanners with a panicked internal directive to frontline TSA officers within a week of the release of the Corbett video, instructing all officers to begin randomly patting down the sides of passengers, essentially making the machines no more than million dollar random pat-down generators– ones that emit radiation and capture nude images of passengers– a procedural redundancy, since random pat-downs are already performed on passengers.

This billion dollar comedy of errors would perhaps not be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that, again, in addition to the TSA’s reckless foisting of this ineffective technology on the public, the technology exposes millions of flyers (which, for the first year of its roll out, included toddlers) to completely unnecessary doses of radiation. Low-level doses? Yes, assuming that the scanners are functioning properly. But as usual with the TSA, the question concerns the big picture in all of this, not myopic technicalities such as Rapiscan’s  specs concerning the theoretical properly-functioning nude scanner. The real question is whether or not it even made any sense at all to subject travelers to this theoretically small, yet unnecessary dose of radiation, to begin with.

It didn’t.

The backscatter units do not work (possibly one reason why Europe recently banned  them), and that there are still hundreds of them operating in American airports is absurd. As to the “harmless dose of radiation” that the TSA always speaks so reassuringly of (which is true, assuming that any given machine is functioning according to the manufacturers’ specifications) I believe it is important for the public to know that the number of TSA employees who themselves feel extremely uncomfortable working around these machines due to concerns about the radiation is substantial. I am confident that a discreet, nationwide survey given to the frontline TSA officers who operate the backscatter machines would confirm this.

The lesson here is not that the TSA should replace all backscatter machines with millimeter wave units; the TSA is already doing this, rushing to sweep another reckless, costly, embarrassing decision under the rug. The real take away here is that all of this represents business as usual for the Transportation Security Administration, and that it would probably be a good idea for lawmakers and their constituents to take a good hard look at TSA’s decision making processes.

In addition to all this, in my years at the agency I witnessed TSA management at local levels routinely becoming lax in their enforcement of the agency’s original promise to the public that officers would never come face-to-face with the passenger whose nude image they viewed. They did this in order to decrease the enormous wait times produced by the ineffective machines themselves, often urging– under threat of disciplinary measures– the speeding up of checkpoint floor rotations. In many cases (such as where, for instance, the past 5 images were male, with only 1 female) this makes it easy for officers to match a passenger with the nude image they just viewed, completely validating just one of EPIC’s privacy concerns. FOIA requests for the checkpoint footage of the average large, highly trafficked airport where the backscatter machines were or are installed could substantiate this. I have a few ideas as to specific sections of footage, which will soon be passed along to EPIC. All of this information, taken together, serves to confirm EPIC’s general concern that the full body scanner program is “unlawful, invasive, and ineffective.”

The obvious question is this: since the full body scanners– both backscatter as well as MMW iterations– essentially amount to little more than just random pat down generators, why not cut the costly, much-maligned “middle man” machines out of the picture as primary screening methods altogether, and just continue with the existing random pat downs, which are already performed both officially and de facto?

The answer is that it would be an acknowledgement of poor decision making by the TSA, as well as a concession of proposed budgetary needs. It is characteristic of a large bureaucratic organization such as the TSA to attempt to exert and consolidate its power, inflate its necessity and needs insofar as possible (Wilson, James Q. “Bureaucracy”) so as to justify large budgets, private contracts, and extraneous, yet well-paying upper level management positions in this “top heavy” organization, as the Government Accountability Office’s May 9 report on the TSA deemed it, “an unmanageable agency, evidenced by its 400% increase in workforce since its founding, an agency’s flaws that are not the fault of TSA employees working everyday on the front lines, but instead that of a bloated leadership structure in Washington, DC. Our investigations of TSA have been met with obfuscation, excuses and attempts to mislead”.

“We have many layers protecting the nation from the ever-evolving terrorist threat.”

That is the refrain that TSA launches into in the face of most criticism: an incessant drone concerning layers; 20 layers in all. The TSA’s go-to sleight-of-hand rhetoric of critically-important, billion dollar security layers amounts to little more than a distraction from the big picture; the big picture revealing the truth of a world where terrorism is so rare and unpredictable as to make most of the taxpayers’ money the TSA spends better spent elsewhere. As security expert Bruce Schneier has often sharply observed, “once a terrorist gets to an airport, it is already too late”

The question is not whether this or that layer of security performs a function. The question is whether the function— be it behavior detection or full body scanners— makes any sense at all in the big picture, and whether or not the money spent on the TSA’s lavishly-funded winter wardrobe of layers is really doing anything beyond making for a good fashion show.

It is also a good time to remind you, dear American public, that you have essentially paid more than 1 billion dollars over the past 4 years, and will likely pay somewhere near a quarter of a billion dollars more in 2013, for a group of self-proclaimed truth wizards to patrol your airports, playing the role of airport terror busters. I am not using the term “truth wizards” arbitrarily, or purely derisively. Not enough people realize that the man behind the theory of the BDO program as it is taught (in conjunction with Israel’s airport security model) Paul Ekman, deemed his science capable of bringing out the “truth wizard”  in all of us. This “science” was bought, wholesale, by your federal government (Ekman’s research having itself been widely criticized by the scientific community, see “On Lie Detection Wizards,” Bond and Usayl, 2007.)

People call the TSA “Thousands Standing Around.” Within TSA culture, I can tell you that the BDOs have a place further derision. After an “intensive” 2 weeks of training in a program that has been roundly questioned to possess any scientific merit by leading publications, often fresh out of high school and 2 weeks of airport security training, a BDO is unleashed upon the world as a federal airport human lie detection machine.

One of the most prestigious scientific publications in the world, Nature,  found the program’s value to be spurious.  In 2008 the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences deemed the program’s underlying theory as “preliminary, at best.” The Government Accountability Office, in 2011, suggested that the TSA should have determined the scientific validity of the SPOT program before implementation (the same conclusion which was reached with the full body scanners).

A 2011 congressional report that same year correctly deemed the BDO program “one of TSA’s biggest failures.” The entire BDO program is, in fact, probably “no more accurate at detecting a terrorist than a flip of a coin.”(Hontz, C. R., Hartwig, M., Kleinman, S. M. & Meissner, C. A. Credibility Assessment at Portals, Portals Committee Report, 2009.) Link

And now, just a few months ago, it was found that— surprise—BDOs at Logan International Airport were profiling in order to meet imposed quotas and produce numbers to ostensibly justify their program’s existence to tax payers.

Larger airports even devote the BDOs to full time “walking the line,” freeing them of any other work, so that they are essentially strolling around for 8 hours every day at 20 dollars an hour, trying to detect microexpressions in terrorists who aren’t there, or completely missing the ones who, ever so rarely, do pass through (Hearing Before the Subcommittee of Investigations and Oversight, 2011).

If anything, the SPOT program could possibly make sense with highly trained officers operating in a single, small, high-stakes, politically-unique setting such as Israel’s Ben Gurion International. In a crowded American airport, this already-shaky science becomes absolutely useless. One where, for instance, Federal officers are discovered to be using racial profiling in order to get numbers, or where at “least 16 least individuals later accused of involvement in terrorist plots flew 23 different times through U.S. airports since 2004, yet none were stopped by TSA behavior detection officers working at those airports.”

One of these terrorists was Faisal Shahzad, the attempted Times Square bomber of 2010, whose attempted destructive handy work was detected and heroically brought to real law enforcement’s attention by a street vendor, Aliou Niasse, a Muslim.

Let’s all just be glad that Niasse was not being detained and “chatted down” by a racially-profiling BDO at Logan or Newark at the time.

The solution to all these inherently flawed systems of TSA’s is not retraining or ad hoc quick fixes. The solution is to cut loose the unnecessary, ineffective, unpopular, wasteful and intrusive measures, and to address the fact that the problem is systemic, lying within the TSA’s culture and modus operandi. The fundamental problem with this organization and its mission to become an advanced counter-terrorism organization is precisely that it needs to stop trying to be an advanced counter-terrorism organization. Again: once a determined and lethal terrorist gets to an airport, it is already too late. We need to repeat and accept this, as taxpayers, media entities, and society as a whole: a group of airport cops is not going to be the ones to foil or deter a determined terrorist.

The terrorists on 9/11 could have pulled off what they did with the same security we have today on the checkpoint. This whole subconscious culture of the TSA’s— caught in a perpetual, quixotic quest to retroactively prevent 9/11— needs to stop (and D.C., if you are reading, please, enough with the 9/11 propaganda in your officer training videos, please).

All of this, dear readers, seems just as ridiculous to the thinking TSA employee as it seems to the public, I assure you. Work life as a Transportation Security Administration officer is bizarre and surreal, where a federal officer is as likely as not to be heard bragging about her skill as a “wizard”; where officers have historically been compelled, per federal standard operating procedure, to inform the pilot of an airplane, with a straight face, that his Swiss army knife must be confiscated, under the logic that he may use it to hijack his own plane.

As anyone working for TSA will likely attest (in private, at least), working for the TSA has the feel of riding atop the back of a large, dopey dog fanatically chasing its tail clockwise for a while, then counterclockwise, and back again, ad infinitum.

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