First Draft takes this quote from Tom Ridge:
Outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said Tuesday that the government should reconsider how it warns people about security threats, saying that its color-coded scale has invited “questions and even occasional derision.”
And destroys it .
This account of the goings-on at the MIA TSA branch, brought to you by the feisty local Miami New Times, is worse than not pretty. It's pretty ugly: allegations of theft from passengers' bags, sexual harassment (of other TSA employees), massive featherbedding, internal racism, and general incompetence.
Your Safety, Their Punch Line: Internal mistakes and misjudgments in day-to-day operations are even harder to root out, since the rare fool employee who might criticize, even constructively, is immediately dispatched. From the TSA's earliest days, screeners have complained of ongoing breaches of security at their workplaces, the result of improper inspection procedures. I know of several instances, both here and at other airports, in which the employees responsible for violations were never corrected or reprimanded. But the whistleblowers — who committed the unpardonable sin of not just telling the truth, but of telling the truth about bosses or co-workers — were fired. Some have also asserted that in the weeks leading up to their dismissals, their personnel files suddenly began bristling with fabricated documentation of inappropriate or illegal activities.
Repressing criticism might be a way of streamlining operations, but it conceals security problems that sooner or later, one way or another, will be revealed. Even the greenest screener at MIA knows that an alert terrorist would have little trouble slipping past a checkpoint. And passing through deadly objects? Child's play. That's partly because humans err, but also because TSA rewards those who can look efficient and do nothing, all the while punishing honesty and diligence, which can complicate things. I have to keep reminding myself: TSA management is motivated by priorities that have nothing to do with our job performance.
…
Teeming with sexual intrigue and power plays, TSA is more dating service than disciplined “security administration.” So I guess I shouldn't have been surprised this past week to hear a manager cryptically refer to some “investigation” of TSA employees who've allegedly been offering money to airline employees in exchange for “sexual favors,” or of the departure of two more top managers, Paul Diener and William Morrison, owing to allegations of sexual harassment.
…
One screener describes her checkpoint: “There's a group who's always standing around talking or going on breaks whenever it's their time to [do certain tasks]. So a few screeners end up doing everything. Whenever we complain to supervisors, they say, 'Oh yeah, I'll have to talk to him or her.' But then nothing changes. … Nobody complains anymore — we just have to accept it.”
Kerik Withdraws Name for Homeland Security Chief.
Does that mean we can expect the original to replace the copy? He did, after all, say,
We only see the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do.
Sounds like just the guy to run the Ministry of Internal Security in this administration.
One of the many horrifying things about the old Soviet Union was the use of psychiatry to silence dissidents. Anyone who dared suggest that the country wasn't a workers' paradise clearly had lost their grip on reality, right?
Fortunately, nothing like that could ever happen here, say to someone who claims that US troops torture captives.
[IP] Latest in Security: This just in from BBC.
BBC World Service just told us that French airport security forces, in a security exercise to train and/or test explosive-sniffing dogs, planted plastic explosives in random pieces of real outgoing luggage, intending of course to remove them all before they were loaded on planes.
Unfortunately one of those pieces of luggage got away. French airport security has sent out an all-points alert to the world's airports that an unsuspecting passenger is carrying explosives he or she knows nothing about.
The luggage is blue.
Just amazingly dumb.
My personal experiences with TSA vary from great to OK, and tend to be much better than my often not real good experiences with private cops doing airport security.
It seems, though, that other people are having bad experiences and terrible experiences with the TSA at the airport. Add this to the new pro-groping policy (“I'm from the government and I'm here to feel you up”?), plans for nude screening and the scene is set for popular push back against this multi-multi-million dollar exercise in bolting barn doors long after the entire menagerie has bolted.
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