“Again, it’s because you can fire a bad contractor, but you can’t fire the government. I think TSA stands for Thousands Standing Around.” -John Stossel
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This is a no brainer coming from our side of the house, and I salute John Stossel for calling it the way he sees it. I brought up three interesting informational pieces on airport security, and the reasoning behind going the private route. For one, it works, and number two, it is what the Israelis do.
I know, I know, we have a much larger airport system in America than the Israelis do. But we must look hard at what we are doing, versus what others are doing, and ‘build a snowmobile’ out of the thing. Privatizing airport security is just one component of the strategy, and using what we can from the Israeli and European models is essential. By the way, I love the quote that Stossel put together up top. lol-Matt
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O’Reilly Tonight: Privatize the TSA
By John Stossel
January 5, 2010
I’ll go on O’Reilly tonight to talk about the ridiculous new flight rules from the TSA .
Before my last flight, right after Christmas, security officials patted me down. I was wearing shorts. But they patted down my bare legs. There is a lot of “security” that seems pointless. Jet Blue told us that TSA had ordered them to keep all TV’s off for the whole flight. Everyone had to stay seated for an hour before takeoff — without blankets, pillows or personal belongings on their laps. And so on—you’ve heard about the new rules.
Those rules might help stop a terrorist if he did the exact same thing that Abdulmutallab attempted on Christmas. In reality, I suspect the rules will do nothing but inconvenience millions.
TSA should not exist. Before 9/11, screening was private — private companies, working for government, did the screening. They weren’t very sophisticated, but they did the job. The small knives the hijackers used were not violations of government rules. Neither were unlocked cockpit doors.
After 9/11, the Senate voted 100 to 0 for the TSA. Tom Daschle said “you can’t professionalize if you don’t federalize.”
What nonsense. It’s instinctive to think that the government will step in and do things better, but it NEVER DOES. Private contractors at least have to compete to keep their contracts. You can’t fire the government.
Israel once had government-run security, but privatized in 1995. Since then there hasn’t been a single hijacking.
Rafi Sela, president of the Israeli transportation consulting group AR Challenges, and a former security consultant with the Ben Gurion International Airport, told me that the US government is taking on too many roles.
“The problem in America is that from day one the US decided to hold the stick on both sides. Which means it’s both the regulator and the operator, which is unheard of in [Israeli] security… [here it] is all done by private contractors.”
One airport in the U.S. that was still allowed to use private security helps prove the point.
According to a leaked 2004 TSA report obtained by USA Today, inspectors packed hidden bomb materials in everyday carry-ons to test security. Screeners at Los Angeles International Airport missed about 75% — but San Francisco screeners, who work for a private company instead of the TSA, missed only 20%.
In their publicly available report, the TSA concluded that “privately screened airports have met the standard articulated in ATSA that contract screening operations perform at the same level or better than federally screened operations.”
Again, it’s because you can fire a bad contractor, but you can’t fire the government.
I think TSA stands for Thousands Standing Around.
Story here.
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Time to Rethink Airport Security
July 26, 2006
by Robert W. Poole, Jr., and James Jay Carafano, Ph.D.
(An excerpt from the paper)
Four years of experience have taught that the U.S. government cannot do the job any better than the private sector. This should come as no surprise. Virtually every other country that has used government screeners has reached the same conclusion. When countries first tried to thwart airplane hijacking in the 1970s, most nations initially used government employees to beef up airport security through a government transportation or justice agency.
Beginning in the 1980s, European airports began to develop a performance-contracting model under which the government set and enforced high performance standards, which airports then carried out by hiring security companies or occasionally using their own staff. Belgium was the first to adopt this model in 1982, followed by the Netherlands in 1983 and the United Kingdom in 1987. The 1990s saw a new wave of conversions to the public–private partnership model, with Germany switching in 1992, France in 1993, Austria and Denmark in 1994, Ireland and Poland in 1998, and Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland in 1999.
In 2001, the GAO examined the security screening practices of Canada, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.[8] Its report focused on the superior performance of the European airports, all of which use the performance-contracting model. The GAO reported four areas of significant differences between U.S. and European screening practices at the time:
• Better overall security system design (e.g., allowing only ticketed passengers past screening and stationing law enforcement personnel at or near checkpoints);
• Higher qualifications and training requirements for screeners (e.g., 60 hours in France versus 12 hours as then required by the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States);
• Better pay and benefits, resulting in much lower turnover rates; and
• Screening responsibility lodged with the airport or national government, not with airlines.
When Congress passed the ATSA, it ignored the fact that, as a result of high standards and government monitoring, nearly every European airport had adopted performance contracting over the past two decades. Israel and a number of nations in the Caribbean and the Far East also use this model. No country has emulated the United States and had its national government take over the actual operation of its passenger-screening system.
Publication here.
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Israeli Airport Security (from Wikipedia)
El Al Airlines is headquartered in Israel. The last hijacking occurred on July 23, 1969, and no plane departing Ben Gurion Airport, just outside Tel Aviv, has ever been hijacked.
It was in 1972 that terrorists from the Japanese Red Army launched an attack that led to the deaths of at least 24 people at Ben Gurion. Since then, security at the airport relies on a number of fundamentals, including a heavy focus on what Raphael Ron, former director of security at Ben Gurion, terms the “human factor”, which may be generalized as “the inescapable fact that terrorist attacks are carried out by people who can be found and stopped by an effective security methodology.”
On December 27, 1985, terrorists simultaneously attacked El Al ticket counters at the Rome, Italy and Vienna, Austria airports using machine guns and hand grenades. Nineteen civilians were killed and many wounded. In response, Israel developed further methods to stop such massacres and drastically improved security measures around Israeli airports and even promised to provide plainclothes armed guards at each foreign airport. The last successful airline-related terrorist attack was in 1986, when a security agent found a suitcase full of explosives during the initial screening process. While the bag did not make it on board, it did injure 13 after detonating in the terminal.
As part of its focus on this so-called “human factor,” Israeli security officers interrogate travelers using racial profiling, singling out those who appear to be Arab based on name or physical appearance. Additionally, all passengers, even those who do not appear to be of Arab descent, are questioned as to why they are traveling to Israel, followed by several general questions about the trip in order to search for inconsistencies. Although numerous civil rights groups have demanded an end to the profiling, Israel maintains that it is both effective and unavoidable. As stated by Ariel Merari, an Israeli terrorism expert, “it would be foolish not to use profiling when everyone knows that most terrorists come from certain ethnic groups. They are likely to be Muslim and young, and the potential threat justifies inconveniencing a certain ethnic group.”
Passengers leaving Israel are checked against a computerized list. The computers, maintained by the Israeli Ministry of Interior, are connected to the Israeli police and Interpol in order to catch suspects or others leaving the country illegally.
Despite such tight security, an incident occurred on November 17, 2002 in which a man apparently slipped through airport security at Ben Gurion Airport with a pocketknife and attempted to storm the cockpit of El Al Flight 581 en route from Tel Aviv to Istanbul, Turkey. While no injuries were reported and the attacker was subdued by guards hidden among the passengers 15 minutes before the plane landed safely in Turkey, authorities did shut down Ben Gurion for some time after the attack to reassess the security situation and an investigation was opened to determine how the man, an Israeli Arab, managed to smuggle the knife past the airport security.
At a conference in May 2008, the United States Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told Reuters interviewers that the United States will seek to adopt some of the Israeli security measures at domestic airports. He left his post in January of 2009, a mere 6 months after this statement, which may or may not have been enough time to implement them.
On a more limited focus, American airports have been turning to the Israeli government and Israeli-run firms to help upgrade security in the post-9/11 world. Israeli officials toured Los Angeles Airport in November 2008 to re-evaluate the airport after making security upgrade recommendations in 2006, and Ron’s company, New Age Security Solutions, based in Washington, D.C., consults on aviation security at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Calling Ben Gurion “the world’s safest airport,” Antonio Villaraigosa, mayor of Los Angeles, has implemented the Israeli review in order to bring state-of-the-art technology and other tactical measures to help secure LAX, considered to be the state’s primary terrorist target and singled out by the Al Qaeda network.
Other US airports to incorporate Israeli tactics and systems include Port of Oakland and the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority. “The Israelis are legendary for their security, and this is an opportunity to see firsthand what they do, how they do it and, as importantly, the theory behind it,” said Steven Grossman, director of aviation at the Port of Oakland. He was so impressed with a briefing presented by the Israelis that he suggested a trip to Israel to the U.S. branch of Airports Council International in order to gain a deeper understanding of the methods employed by Israeli airport security and law enforcement.
Link to Wikipedia here.