November 2001 - VOLUME 22 - NUMBER 11
Corporations and National Security
On September 23, 2001, Brian Fitzgerald, a thin and cleancut Caucasian
man, entered the Seattle airport to fly home to Arizona. He was booked
on Southwest Airlines flight 1439 direct to Phoenix. Knowing that security
would be tight in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, he showed up early for
his 11:45 a.m. flight. Security guards were stopping every vehicle driving
up to the terminal. He knew this would take a little extra time, but he
was glad to see the armed officers and felt reassured. Fitzgerald arrived at the security checkpoint for Terminal B with his
carry-on backpack, which he placed on the conveyer belt of the x-ray machine.
As he walked through the metal detectors, the alarm went off and he was
asked to step aside. He was frisked and given a thorough going over with
a hand-held metal detector. Finding nothing amiss, the airport security
screeners allowed him to retrieve his backpack and board the plane. Fitzgeralds experience was not unique. New York Daily News reporters
went to the airports where the 9-11 flights originated and were able to
sneak knives and razors onto flights. In total, the News team was able
to sneak several of the following items on 10 out of the 12 flights they
boarded: a camping knife with a 2 1/2 inch blade, a multi-tool with a
knife blade, box cutters like the ones used in the terrorist attacks,
scissors and pepper spray. More recently, a Nepalese man was stopped at Chicagos OHare
airport after he had made it through the x-ray checkpoint. He was in possession
of seven knives and a stun gun that had somehow escaped detection. The Fitzgerald and other incidents highlight what air transportation
safety advocates say is a startling post-September airline safety record.
While numerous plans have been expounded, regulations and legislation
considered and a rhetorical commitment to safety ratcheted up, not much
has changed in actual practice. That has safety advocates alarmed. Two presidential commissions and numerous reports by the Department of
Transportations Inspector General, Congresss General Accounting
Office and airline safety advocates have outlined dozens of serious gaps
in security procedures over the years: lack of adequate screening for
checked bags, access to high-risk areas by catering companies and others
lacking security clearance, and inadequate training of x-ray operators,
to name a few. A handful of improvements have made their way into law,
but the bulk of the proposals for increased security have not been adopted;
and even those adopted are often not rigorously implemented. Lax regulators and a cost-conscious airline industry share responsibility
for the dismal state of U.S. airline security, according to safety advocates.
The airlines have successfully resisted calls for strengthened safety
measures such as matching checked bags with passengers and not
letting a checked bag on without a corresponding passenger primarily
to avoid the additional expense. In the United States, airlines are charged
with screening both passengers and luggage. Here too, they have cut costs
and corners, with dire potential consequences, according to safety advocates.
A month after the September attacks, much of the testimony on Capitol
Hill is about lowering airline security, says Paul Hudson, executive
director of the Washington, D.C.-based Aviation Consumer Action Project,
not, as you might expect, about maintaining current standards or
increasing them. The ban on having commercial airliners carrying unscreened mail and cargo
was also lifted. Restrictions that limited the nations thousands
of private aircraft from flying near major metropolitan areas were phased
out a little over one month after the September attacks. The evolving response to September 11 fits a familiar pattern, says Paul
Hudson, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Aviation Consumer
Action Project. After air disasters, he says, more often than not
there is a substitution of plans and proposals for real actions. Then
the heat goes down and nothing happens. The post-September 11 restrictions
are fading away; and new farther-reaching rules are on hold in Congress,
where controversy over federalizing baggage scanners has stalled new safety
rules. For now, the most visible change in airport security is the dramatically
increased presence of law enforcement officers and national guardsmen.
But many security experts see these deployments as cosmetic. Its a dog and pony show, these soldiers with AK-47s, but
security isnt much different, says Peter Williamson, vice
president with Rapiscan Security Products, makers of airport security
inspection equipment. Law enforcement personnel on site may provide some
modest deterrent effect, but probably does little to slow determined terrorists. Where changes are perhaps most needed, say safety advocates, is in the
handling of checked and carry-on baggage. Although many called for the scanning of all checked bags after the Lockerbie
explosion, the FAA never mandated advanced bomb screening. It appears
that progress on this front will remain slow going after September 11.
Prior to September 11, the FAA had set 2009 as a target for when all
checked bags should be screened by advanced machines. The machines, called
CT scanners or CTX machines, are able to detect various threats from plastic
explosives to more traditional bombs. Under current rules, air carriers are responsible for operating and maintaining
the bomb detection machines purchased by the FAA, but the airlines are
not forced to accept them. According to Department of Transportation Inspector
General Kenneth Mead, prior to September 11 a major U.S. carrier had one
machine while a small airline had four. One airport refused an advanced
machine because it did not match the terminals color scheme. Twenty
of the million-dollar machines were sitting in a government warehouse
collecting dust, though post-9-11 the FAA has claimed that deployment
would once again move forward. Of those machines that have been deployed, most are underused. Mead told
the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure exactly one month
after the September attacks that a July 2001 study found that one-third
of the machines were being used to scan fewer than 225 bags per
day, on average, compared to a certified rate of 225 bags per hour. After 9-11, the FAA required that all airports with advanced bomb detection
machines use them continuously, rather than occasionally. But even after
the September 11 tragedy, the Inspector General found that at seven high-risk
airports the machines were not being used at their capacity. Mead told
the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee that at some locations
the machine was not turned on; at others, the machines were on and staffed
with screeners, but no baggage was screened. Security experts say at most 5 percent of checked bags are now screened
for bombs using the advanced machines and estimates are as low as one
in 10,000. Enforcement actions are certainly being looked at to compel
more screening, says Rebecca Trexler of the FAA Public Affairs Department,
though she expresses frustration that further motivation would be required
in the wake of September 11. Even with well-trained screeners, the job is inherently difficult. If
there is a relatively low rate of incident, for example, finding a gun
in a carry-on bag once every couple months or even years, the accuracy
rate for detection when a dangerous item does appear on the x-ray screen
will be low. This is a predictable result, given the difficulty of focusing
on x-ray screens with bags rapidly passing by. With high rates of incident
assume a knife or gun is in every few bags very high detection
rates can be achieved. But screeners at airports typically deal with the
former not the latter. The post-9-11 FAA ban on almost all metal objects that might be used
as a weapon everything from nail clippers to sewing needles to
scissors is increasing the frequency of incidents, and almost certainly
elevating the attentiveness of screeners. But attentiveness is not the only challenge. Many potential weapons are
hard to detect. For example, a gun in profile is easy to see,
says Peter Williamson, a vice president at Rapiscan, a company that makes
the x-ray screening machines used at airports, but detecting a gun when
it is viewed from the top, with the barrel facing down and the trigger
obscured, is much more difficult. The same problems apply to knives and other potential weapons. A backpack
that has been modified so its steel frame can be removed for use as a
weapon is even harder if not impossible to spot as a weapon.
The airlines, which control carry-on security, are not using available
equipment and technologies that would help address or counteract these
problems. For example, threat image projection (TIP) is a software system that
imposes a digital image of a dangerous item into a bag being screened,
or it creates an entirely fictitious bag containing a dangerous item,
in order to keep screeners on their toes and keep accuracy high. It also
measures each screeners rate of detection for the imposed images.
This performance data could be used to identify areas for additional
training which the TIP program can also provide. But the FAA does not require use of this technology in a systematic way.
TIP has only been activated on a little more than half of the TIP-ready
machines, according to the Inspector General. In at least two airports
where the program has been activated, a recent Inspector General investigation
determined that operators had learned the password and disabled the program
during their shifts. But the airline industry has displayed a long-term reluctance to spend
money to enhance safety. It has resisted deploying and using new security
technologies, and failed to provide competent and well-trained baggage
screeners. The result, say safety advocates, is a terrible gamble with passengers
well-being. No new form of terrorism has ever not been repeated unless there
is much heightened security or a strong deterrent, says Hudson.
Right now we have neither. |
Background Checkered
The U.S. government has lodged responsibility for screening of passengers
and carry-on bags with the airlines, which in turn subcontracted responsibility
to five private security firms. The industry has compiled a spectacularly poor record. In May 2000, industry leader Argenbright, which controls roughly 40 percent
of the market and is owned by the British firm Securicor, pled guilty
to two counts of making false statements to federal regulators and paid
$1.55 million in fines in connection with charges that it failed on a
massive scale to do background checks on airport screeners employed at
the Philadelphia airport and failed to provide them with required training,
and then lied to federal authorities about it. We could have charged them with 100 counts, or 1,000, Assistant
U.S. Attorney John Pease told the New York Times. But the government settled
for a plea agreement that included a new compliance program and a three
year probationary period. Prosecutors hopes that the compliance program would change the
companys culture appear misplaced. In October 2001, the parties
returned to the U.S. District Court for Eastern Pennsylvania with a new
plea agreement. That plea extended Argenbrights probationary period
from three to five years, and required the company to do new background
checks, including fingerprinting, of its employees. In submissions to the court, the federal government claimed that Argenbright
continued with the same practices for which it had been earlier cited,
including failing to do background checks on screeners, making false submissions
to the FAA, failing to do compliance checks, and engaging in a host of
new FAA violations. Argenbrights shoddy record highlighted what almost everyone agrees
are pervasive problems in the industry, including low-pay (average wages
for screeners are $6 an hour) and extremely high turnover. These are problems
that the screeners say are due to pressure from the airlines to cut costs.
If they paid more, they say, the airlines would not hire them. After September 11, it was immediately clear that the industrys
future existence was in danger. The tragedy generated momentum for the
federal government to take over the responsibility of airport screening
and to make the screeners federal employees. Showing an efficiency that critics found absent in their normal functioning,
the security companies had within two days formed a trade association,
the Aviation Security Association, to try to forestall federalization
and save the industry. The association hired Kenneth Quinn, a partner in the law firm Pillsbury
Winthrop, to carry its water. Quinn had served as counsel at the Department
of Transportation in the Bush I administration, as well as chief counsel
at the Federal Aviation Administration. He worked in Bush I for Andrew
Card, now chief of staff in the current Bush White House. The association
also hired leading PR flacks Burson-Marsteller to handle media requests. At press time, however, it appeared that even deployment of high-powered Washington insiders was not going to be enough to overcome the September 11 momentum for ending the national experiment in private security at airports. Robert Weissman |