About an hour ago, the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure held a press conference to discuss the contents of their report “A Decade Later: A Call for TSA Reform”. Not surprisingly, the contents of the report are largely unfavorable in regards to TSA's effectiveness and highly critical of the bureaucratic weight of the organization. (You can download the report here if you're interested in reading for yourself.) Also unsurprisingly, TSA has retaliated with a series of statistics meant to prove their worth. My current favorite is the number that in the past 10 years, TSA has prevented over 1,100 guns from being brought on airplanes. Seriously? Firearms? That's it? If TSA has screened over 5 billion passengers in the past ten years, that amounts to .00002% of all non-authorized passengers trying to get guns in the cabins of airplanes, or roughly one person for every 4.5 million people. Roughly 637 million passengers fly into or out of U.S. airports every day. The odds, then, of you being on a flight that might have had a gun in the cabin if TSA were not screening on any given day is more than 1 in 141 million. Holy buckets. (Also, if TSA is so worried about guns, why can't I fly with a full tube of toothpaste, hmmm?) The report notes that the current threat trends to aircraft are no longer considered to be hijacking, but rather explosives smuggled onto planes in order to bring down the aircraft. I'll leave my personal feelings on that assessment out of it (okay, maybe a quick soapbox: aircraft are no longer the most vulnerable part of our travel infrastructure, so we're wasting time, money and opportunity on all of this! Okay, back to the show.) but the report does also note that the previous efforts to implement effective explosives screenings were unreliable and expensive. How's that for a nice cluster of contradictory efforts?
Anyway, the point is this: TSA is a big, fat, ineffective money-draining organization, and the Country is broke. This report, at least to me, seems specifically designed to target funding reduction at the TSA, and it exploits the laughable efforts of airport security as legitimate rational for that recommendation. Here is my concern: While TSA airport security measures are, in fact, outdated, ineffective, inconvenient, borderline-illegal, and generally scoff-worthy, the TSA overall is responsible for a lot more than airports. Our rail lines are still mostly unsecured, and our harbor security is...well, privatized. I suppose that wouldn't be such a problem if so many of our ports were not foreign owned. I agree TSA needs better leadership and needs to tighten up procedures and staffing across the board...but maybe the solution is to implement effective security measures against our actual vulnerabilities, instead of the high-profile ones? Just a thought. Frankly, I'll take my chances that a crazy person might bring a handgun on a plane.
