Overall, the report described the TSA’s terrorism screening process as being “generally effective,” even though the agency failed to detect and identify 73 active airline workers with links to terrorism and lacked “effective controls to keep prospective employees with criminal histories and illegal status from getting a job at airports in the U.S,” says CNN.
Believe it or not, the report says the reason the 73 employees were not identified is because the TSA is not authorized to receive all terrorism-related information under the current inter-agency watchlist policy. To read the redacted report from the Inspector General’s Office, go HERE.
This latest report on the failings of the TSA follows a scathing report the DHS released last week detailing the 95 percent fail rate of TSA airport security officers when confronted with undercover testing of security measures. as reported in Digital Journal.
That failure led to the removal of Melvin Carraway, the TSA’s acting chief. This move put Acting Deputy Director Mark Hatfield in charge until Coast guard vice-admiral Peter Neffenger, who was nominated to lead the TSA in April by President Obama, gets his confirmation by the Senate.
Inter-agency conflict seems to be the problem
Under the current system, the TSA allows airports and airlines to carry out criminal background checks on prospective employees, but the TSA does not oversee or verify the results of the process. “TSA did not have an adequate monitoring process in place to ensure that airport operators properly adjudicated credential applicants’ criminal histories,” the report reads.
Rafi Sela is the owner of AR Challenges, an Israeli-based consulting company that specializes in airport security challenges and protocols. Sela spoke with the guardian, saying the TSA has had problems for years, primarily because of a lack of a centralized system of administering watchlists.
“There is no correlation between the information the CIA, FBI, US Marshall service and other intelligence agencies generate and absolutely none between them and the DHS,” he said. “It’s very easy to miss terrorists on the watchlist, and the definition of a terrorist is very vague.”
Sela added that the TSA needs to change its whole approach to airline security, saying “If you want to really do transportation security the way you should, go after the intent and invest in intelligence, and not check the luggage. Checking the luggage is the most absurd thing to do in security.”