TSA Fails To Find Links To Terrorism of Airport Workers 166
schwit1 writes: An audit of the TSA has found that the agency failed to uncover the terrorist connections of 73 aviation workers when it did background checks of them. According to a report released Monday, the people were employed by major airlines, airport vendors and other employers, and were not identified because the agency lacked access to terrorism-related information from within the government. The agency's "multi-layered process to vet aviation workers for potential links to terrorism was generally effective. In addition to initially vetting every application for new credentials, TSA recurrently vetted aviation workers with access to secured areas of commercial airports every time the Consolidated Terrorist Watchlist was updated," the report found. "However, our testing showed that TSA did not identify 73 individuals with terrorism-related category codes because TSA is not authorized to receive all terrorism-related information under current interagency watchlisting policy." This report comes on the heels of an internal TSA investigation that found 95% of agents testing airport checkpoints were able to bring weapons through.
Real banner week for the TSA... (Score:5, Interesting)
First there was the disastrous results of the audit (95% failure rate). Top dog resigns. Now we find out that the TSA does not even have the proper inter-departmental authority. If this wasn't a serious matter it would absolutely hilarious.
Cue the Benny Hill theme in 4...3...2...1
Re:Real banner week for the TSA... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there anything the TSA does right? Aside from being a federal jobs program for tens of thousands of people?
If conservatives are so in favor of small government and so against welfare, maybe they ought to take a good hard look at the TSA. I'd vote for a presidential candidate who pledged to eliminate this useless boondoggle agency.
Re:Real banner week for the TSA... (Score:5, Insightful)
Spot on. The TSA is utterly useless. A complete waste of taxpayer money. Worse than that, it gives Americans a false sense of security where none exists. Let's see if any of the Republican candidates have the guts to sack the entire thing. Rand Paul or Ted Cruz are the only two that come to mind.
Re:Real banner week for the TSA... (Score:5, Insightful)
Spot on. The TSA is utterly useless. A complete waste of taxpayer money. Worse than that, it gives Americans a false sense of security where none exists.
People keep forgetting that the TSA is NOT about security, never has been. It is all about training citizens to mindlessly obey a pompous asshole with a semi-official-looking uniform or be punished (being back-roomed to miss your flight).
Re:Real banner week for the TSA... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not a big TSA fan at all, but seriously....if this is true WHY would a basic thing for employment on a govt job or government regulated job NOT be asked for?
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You'll be engaging in a transaction that requires notification to the Internal Revenue Service; or
You're initiating a financial transaction subject to federal Customer Identification Program rules.
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Right, that's the catch 22. You don't "have" to provide you SS number to companies, you'd just have to live without natural gas, electric, or water service to your residence. All of them pretty much require you to give it to them. I asked if there was an alternative, and was told that if I didn't want to provide my SSN I could come to their office (45 minutes away, longer in traffic) during normal business hours (so like 3 hours off work) and put down a $500 deposit for the account to start service. So yeah
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it is neither useless nor a waste of taxpayer money. It keeps tens of thousands off welfare and more importantly it keeps them from being significantly productive to the point where they might effect the actual labour output of the nation enough that imports of certain commodity items which CAN be produced locally (efficient automobiles, mobile phones and other portable microelectronics, white goods, foodstuffs such as potatoes and sugar) are reduced. It provides security theatre for mass transit and a fals
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I disagree. Air travel in the United States has never been safer. Exactly none of that safety is due to the TSA, but the sense of safety is (at least in part).
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Personally, I felt safer overall back when I could simply walk through the gates and onto the plane without being run through a wringer by own country on a domestic flight. Hell, it's not like I'm likely to be on more than one flight that gets blown up or whatever. The TSA gets you every time.
Actually, as has been noted before, if terrorists weren't so obsessed by the airplanes themselves, that massive chokepoint that has replaced the distributed individual waiting areas is prime target material.
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I disagree. Air travel in the United States has never been safer. Exactly none of that safety is due to the TSA, but the sense of safety is (at least in part).
False. The TSA was created to erode our sense of safety. As recent reports prove, it is solely security theater to make it look like something is being done. But since it doesn't work, yet nothing is happening, we know that nothing need be done — at least, nothing we haven't done already, like reinforced cockpit doors.
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In my neck of the woods the highest group of illegal immigrants are Canadians. They drive pulp trucks. They work in the mills. They chop down trees. They have expired visas and the likes. Oh well. Nobody cares. They are not usually arrested, they are not brown. Nobody notices.
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Because his mother is an American citizen, and was one when he was born, which makes him one from birth. The US Constitution doesn't require the President to have been born in the US, only that he be born a citizen.
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http://harvardlawreview.org/20... [harvardlawreview.org]
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Yeah, my kid was born in Korea, and could legally be U.S. president. I laugh every time I read someone whine about Cruz, not that I'm a fan.
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If they start actually paying more than lip service to 'small government' they might actually lure me back to them.
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The TSA is backed by PETA avidly and they are doing an excellent job per PETA standards / expectations. Almost every TSA employee you see would be unemployed and abusing small animals at home if the TSA did not give them somewhere to go for 8h a day. So next time you see one of them yank a tracheotomy tube out of a child in a wheelchair or cavity search an old woman, just remind yourself of all the safe pets out there.
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Wow, troll? (Score:2)
We're talking about people who, on purpose, took a job where they sexually abuse people for money. And then they proceed to do the job. We're so used to American prisons being a rape factory that we don't mind getting raped in order to get on an airplane? I guess the world really is a prison cell... in America
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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"It's not like the private companies that they replaced were any better" - Agreed - BUT, remember what a big deal was made by the government about how much better they could do than the private companies? Plus, the private companies were paid by the airlines (who admittedly turned around and passed the cost to the traveler). Now, every taxpayer is paying for this fiasco, whether they fly or not. At, I'm certain, many times the cost of the private companies. And every airline ticket has a TSA surcharge to bo
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True. There are, however, people paid poorly enough that they have to take bribes if they want to eat this month. Being paid well doesn't make you immune to bribery, but it does make you less vulnerable to it.
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Nobody is paid well enough to be immune to bribery.
False. Just like any woman who says she'd go to bed with you for a million dollars is a whore. You either have strong moral fiber, or you don't.
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That I'm an idiot, and needed more caffeine? My apologies.
Re:Real banner week for the TSA... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yet thinks its perfectly appropriate for people to walk around with loaded firearms.
You're right that the USA's idea of risk is seriously screwed up. I suspect the ensuing justifications from various gun nuts will only highlight the fact that your society is incapable of having an adult conversation about the subject.
Re:Real banner week for the TSA... (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right that the USA's idea of risk is seriously screwed up. I suspect the ensuing justifications from various gun nuts will only highlight the fact that your society is incapable of having an adult conversation about the subject.
I'm of the thought that if kids aren't scrapping themselves up(knees and other parts) on occasion, they're not having enough fun.
Gun nuts or not, the issue you're seeing is the friction between different types of people. The 'FREEDOM!' gun carrying types tend NOT to be the ones that go apeshit over a scrapped knee in a playground.
We tend to see the extremes of either on the news.
Re:Real banner week for the TSA... (Score:5, Insightful)
I could point out that "walking around with loaded firearms" doesn't hurt anyone, and those who wish to use a loaded firearm to hurt someone will simply ignore any laws that prevent everyone else from walking around with them. I'd also point out that "hurting someone with a loaded firearm" is also a law that people who wish to hurt others with a loaded firearms are ignoring, so you gain nothing by a prohibition on "walking around" with them.
It's already illegal to hurt someone with a loaded firearm, so what do you gain by prohibiting law abiding citizens from carrying them. What is the next law that will solve the problem of bad people doing bad things with guns -- a law against THINKING about loaded firearms?
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Re:Real banner week for the TSA... (Score:5, Insightful)
Cops are more than four times more likely than ordinary citizens to shoot someone who doesn't deserve it in any given armed altercation [hartford.edu] and kill citizens at 70 times the rate of other first-world nations [thefreetho...roject.com], but we still let them carry guns. Sadly, most cops don't train nearly enough — many departments literally have a single monthly firearms training day, or less — so the truth is that the average gun-toting citizen is actually better at putting rounds on target than the average cop. The kind of citizens who carry firearms are also the kind of people who take them to the range regularly.
If you don't want bystanders injured by stray gunfire, or for that matter rounds deliberately fired at undeserving targets, then take the guns away from the cops. Taking them away from responsible citizens won't help.
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Cops are more than four times more likely than ordinary citizens to shoot someone who doesn't deserve it in any given armed altercation and kill citizens at 70 times the rate of other first-world nations
I believe there's a chicken-and-egg thing there. The cops are armed because the criminals are armed. Every time a civilian is shot, we're told that it's because the officers had reason to fear for their life. Even when the civilian is unarmed, the officer gets to use a weapon that can kill at a distance, and they have that weapon at their disposal.
And they actually ARE at risk: last year, 49 police officers died by firearm (two accidentally). (Another ten by vehicular assault, and two by the kinds of non-gu
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Yes, loaded firearms in public are not intimidating at all.
For the most part, no they aren't. For the most part, you don't know who has one and who does not. The vast majority of loaded firearms in public are concealed carry. If you are intimidated by the fact that someone may be a concealed carry holder, then I can only imagine what your behaviour would be were you to know isn't carrying. Are you going to be rude and obnoxious and assault this person, and you are only intimidated because you fear a reprisal? If you aren't going to bother him, he has no reason to
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And why do you carry a firearm?
I'm in my forties, and I never had need for one. Nor does any member of my extended family, counting tens of cousins, uncles, all the way to grand parents. I've been working fo 20 years and I never heard any discussion about needind a firearm from any of my past and present coworkers.
In fact none of the hundred of persons I met and discussed with in all my life ever made even a comment about needing a firearm to protect themselves.
Seriously, is living in the USA so dangerous?
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Yet thinks its perfectly appropriate for people to walk around with loaded firearms.
As long as they're not naked.
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Yet thinks its perfectly appropriate for people to walk around with loaded firearms.
If you do not want to walk around with a loaded firearm, nobody is forcing you. Oh, you want to stop other people from walking around with loaded firearms? Now you have a problem because you do not get to choose what other people can or can not do.
What are the people of Iraq crying for right now? Personally owned weapons... so they can fight off the Da'esh (IS/ISIL/ISIS) menace. It is a good thing that as soon as Iraq had a functioning government that they confiscated all of the personally owned weapons for
Re:Real banner week for the TSA... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not like the private companies that they replaced were any better.
In the pre-9/11 days, I never had my scrotum stroked.
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In the pre-9/11 days, I never had my scrotum stroked.
Look on the bright side, you don't have to give a reach around.
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Pre-9/11 security was good enough to prevent the hijackers from bringing guns on board. That's big. Passengers can overcome a small number of terrorists armed with knives, but guns are another matter.
In other words, with pre-9/11 security and the current attitude of passengers, we'd be just fine.
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More appropriate headline: "TSA Fails"
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What makes you think this is serious? If there was any real terrorist threat, we'd notice TSA incompetence. Since there isn't, the TSA isn't publicly humiliated (well, not much anyway), but is able to pretend it serves a purpose.
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"What makes you think this is serious?" - Well, if we are expecting these clowns to protect us from terrorist attacks then it's serious. From my perspective they are doing a pretty piss poor job at the moment.
"Since there isn't, the TSA isn't publicly humiliated..." - Yes they are. On a random security audit the TSA failed 95% of the tests. 95%. Barely above no security at all. In other words, fucking awful. Now we find out that they don't even have the proper access to do their jobs? Yeah...publicly humili
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They (the federal government in general) were too busy watching the public to vet their own employees.
Kind of like you were too busy getting some snark together to bother reading even the summary, and finding that this wasn't about TSA employees? And that the issue here wasn't competence, but the fact that the agency wasn't allowed access to the data that would have identified the 73 people in question?
Damn, too much useful information. Please ignore so you can snark some more.
Grammar (Score:2)
Slashdot fails to find links to grammar of headlines.
How about "TSA Fails to Find Airport Workers' Links to Terrorism" instead? Unless the TSA was investigating the terrorism of airport workers, that headline is a little bit off.
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Slashdot fails to find links to grammar of headlines.
How about "TSA Fails to Find Airport Workers' Links to Terrorism" instead? Unless the TSA was investigating the terrorism of airport workers, that headline is a little bit off.
Well, to be fair, it's not like they're edited before hitting the front page.
Re:Grammar (Score:5, Funny)
"TSA: Fails to Find Airport Workers. Links to Terrorism."
Shocked! I tell you I'm shocked ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... that the Theater Security Agency has failed to discoverer 1 terrorist.
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The problem is we don't know the nature of these "terror links". Maybe it's the guys third cousin was detected accessing the Anarchists Cookbook three years ago. Maybe it's all just nonsense and there is no need to worry.
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That would be a great poll !
The Onion says it best (Score:2)
The Onion has reported the new TSA plan:
http://www.theonion.com/articl... [theonion.com]
I think it'll be much better than the previous one.
In Other Words (Score:5, Insightful)
So in other words. giving every passenger a cudgel on the way to their seat and locking the damned cabin door would be a cheaper, more effective means of on-plane security.
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So in other words. giving every passenger a cudgel on the way to their seat and locking the damned cabin door would be a cheaper, more effective means of on-plane security.
For bonus points, the pilot should bring up several contentious topics over the PA system.
Patience (Score:5, Insightful)
My karma is good, so I think I need to off burn some excess. Mod me as you will.
What the TSA and every other TLA agency can't protect against: a previously law-abiding person who decides that they must act against America. Their first criminal act may be the one that kills. The 9/11 hijackers did nothing illegal until well after the cabin doors of their aircraft closed.
The TSA can't do shit against someone who has a brain and patience. Not. a. fucking. thing.
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Except that sane people tend not to go crazy without indication. This should allow you to stop the majority of attacks if you keep an ear to the ground rather than waste so much time patting down grannies.
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citations please.
From my experience, people who have already tripped the nutball alarm are the ones likely to flip with indicators - because it is those indicators that have tripped the alarm. By definition, then, sane people aren't crazy and crazy people aren't sane. There's no sane/violently crazy switch, there is a transition between sane/passive-aggressive/batshit-fucking-run.
Why are aircraft cabins decorated in neutral colours? Why are the cabins pressurised to only 8,000 feet ASL? Ask then answer: bec
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Most people can't cope with burst exercise at 8,000 feet pressure, it's like drawing a breath holding it then drawing another breath on top of it - holding that and sprinting 50 metres BEFORE you exhale. Your lungs are going to HURT. 8,000 feet is what professional athletes train at for weeks before the World Championship, soccer players before the FIFA World Cup, cyclists before the Tour de France.
It's really not that bad.....you just breath more heavily.
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explain. And less of the bullshit claims because you have no cogent counterargument.
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On the chance that you're actually asking for information....
Having different pressures inside and outside the aircraft creates stress on the structure. If the pressure differential is less, less stress. To have higher pressure, the aircraft would have to be made stronger, meaning the structure would be heavier. A heavier aircraft means more fuel for the same capacity, or less capacity for the same fuel, and either means more fuel. Fuel costs money. If the aircraft is heavier, then its maximum fuel
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Bullshit. You no nothing about aviation engineering. Please take your tin-foil hat conspiracy somewhere else.
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Explain. And less of the false assumption. It makes you look a fool.
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No explanation necessary on my part. I'm a pilot and an engineer. Another commercial pilot below called bullshit as well. If you're dumb enough to come up with the bullshit you posted, I'm not going to be bothered to try to educate you.
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The 9/11 hijackers did nothing illegal until well after the cabin doors of their aircraft closed.
The TSA can't do shit against someone who has a brain and patience. Not. a. fucking. thing.
During their flight training they performed poorly, threatened women and treated people like the narcissistic religious nutcases they were. A brain and patience appear to be optional.
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Not in the US, no, since they didn't come to the US until they were involved in the plot. They had been active jihadists overseas, and this was known to the CIA (but not the FBI, because the CIA didn't tell them). And while they didn't do anything illegal, they did things that were damn suspicious (most notably their attitudes and actions during their flight training).
How close are the ties? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish the report would go into some detail about how close the ties that these workers have to terrorism were, even if they were anonymized. Were they members or former members of a terrorist group? Is one of their family members or close personal friends a terrorist? It's still a failure to find these people before hiring them, but there's a big difference between "We found that 73 people were former members of a group or groups classified as a terrorist organization" and "We found that 73 people had donated money to the wrong charity or have a distant relative that might be a member of a terrorist organization."
All the report says is that the 73 people were divided into 5 categories and that the TSA didn't have clearance for all 5 categories.
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Came here to post this same comment. This is entire article is nothing but vague and potentially misleading information. I like to hate on the TSA Too, but this article is implying that we need to give the TSA *more* powers, because they didn't find something. But it doesn't won't tell us what the TSA didn't find or why they should have found it.
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I wish the report would go into some detail about how close the ties that these workers have to terrorism were, even if they were anonymized. Were they members or former members of a terrorist group? Is one of their family members or close personal friends a terrorist? It's still a failure to find these people before hiring them, but there's a big difference between "We found that 73 people were former members of a group or groups classified as a terrorist organization" and "We found that 73 people had donated money to the wrong charity or have a distant relative that might be a member of a terrorist organization."
All the report says is that the 73 people were divided into 5 categories and that the TSA didn't have clearance for all 5 categories.
Yes, and what kind of terrorists did they have links to? The kind that blow up buildings and planes? Or the kind that vocally challenges the government when the government wipes their posteriors with the constitution?
Everyone with CT experience knows TSA is a farce (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's because we're being kind.
If anything, it's an expensive waste of time and resources that makes terrorism more likely, especially when combined with unnecessary and counter-productive unconstitutional search and seizure and monitoring of American citizens in America, when the only useful actionable intel we have ever had has been due to intel gathering that started in the Middle East.
Period.
Living in Fear is the wrong answer. Americans are made of sterner stuff than that.
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And that's because we're being kind.
If anything, it's an expensive waste of time and resources that makes terrorism more likely, especially when combined with unnecessary and counter-productive unconstitutional search and seizure and monitoring of American citizens in America, when the only useful actionable intel we have ever had has been due to intel gathering that started in the Middle East.
You're assuming the job of the TSA is to stop terrorists. All evidence points against this conclusion. The TSA is not a CT organisation, it's a PR organisation. The idea is not to stop threats rather it is to simply make Americans feel safer. This is why the key metric of the TSA is not how many terrorists or guns they find, but how safe the average traveller feels.
Also whilst intelligence gathering is a better approach to stopping terrorism than draconian laws, tyrannical airport cops and unnecessary, d
Terrorism of Airport Workers (Score:2)
Wait, "Airport Workers" is a terrorist organization? But the airports are crawling with them...
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This is why you do background checks (Score:2)
the whole TSA security model for is ass backwards.
Rather than anally probing the passangers, do a background check... on all of them. Make that a part of the security process.
Have two lines.
Line one is for people that went through a background check. They can go through a metal detector, with their shoes on, thank you have a nice day.
Then you have another line for people that didn't go through a background check and they get to take their shoes off etc.
Let everyone that wants to go through the faster line p
Re:This is why you do background checks (Score:5, Interesting)
In a somewhat related note, the TSA has almost grounded all flights by not doing proper change management. They repeatedly will begin some server / database maintenance without telling anyone, so we who monitor those systems start getting all sorts of alarms. The last time the TSA pulled down the no-fly database for some maintenance we were about 5 minutes out from alerting the FAA and the whole system going into a lock-down. After some frantic phone calls the TSA was just like "oh yeah, we forgot to tell anyone". From my perspective, they are just as "dangerous" as these "terrorists". Even the terrorists would have a hard time grounding all flights without any violence like has almost happened.
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There is already a line for people who had background checks.
Have you not been to an American airport in the last 3 years? You should have seen signs for TSA Pre [tsa.gov]. It's part of the Trusted Travels program, and you do a little light paperwork for the background check and have your fingerprints taken.
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Its not well advertised or encouraged.
It should be the default system that everyone goes through except for infrequent travelers. Anyone commuting by air or taking business trips or just traveling with any frequency should be able to bypass the system.
And people that apply for visas should be encouraged to do this as well. Any excuse we can come up with to subject people coming into the country to an additional layer of scrutiny is something we should exploit.
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It's kind of hard to miss the signs at the three airports I've been to this year.
If you sign up for a frequent flyer account with most airlines you get a little packet of information, one of them is a TSA Pre brochure. I'm not sure what the online equivalent of such a kit contains, if anything.
If you are applying for a travel visa from Canada or Mexico, you are told of the program as well. This has all come about in the last two years. If you're not a Canadian or Mexican citizen, then you can't use the prog
Doesn't it matter what the "link" actually is? (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, if the workers *are* terrorists then they should be arrested, right? Short of that there are countless ways a non-terrorist can be "linked" with terrorists, and due to the "six degrees of separation" phenomenon it's quite common to have surprising looking connections.
For example Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan and I happen to have a common common friend. I met the friend through work and Bandar knew him because his family was a neighbor in Aspen where Bandar has a house. And since Bandar is in the Saudi royal family and Osama bin Laden belonged to a prominent Saudi family, it's almost certain that Bandar knew him from before his Mujahideen days in Afghanistan. So I'm only two two acquaintances removed from Osama bin Laden. That sounds alarming! But in fact I've never *met* Bandar, in fact I've never met any Saudis at all.
I've been racking my brains for people I've met from the actual Middle East, and it turns out that at one point in my career met the Egyptian-American space researcher Farouk el-Baz (who has a TNG shuttlecraft named after him!). El-Baz comes from a connected family; his brother for example was high up in Hosni Mubarak's government, and Farouk himself was at one time a science adviser to Anwar Sadat. It's a fair bet that he knows somebody from Egypt who later went on to be involved with the Muslim Brotherhood -- it wouldn't reflect on him at all. But if that were true I'd be just one acquaintance away from a direct "connection" with the Muslim Brotherhood.
Now it also happens that my wife went to graduate school with someone who was the first woman valedictorian of the US Naval academy. Since I know her directly, I have all kinds of one-degree of separation relationships to people in all kinds of sensitive military and national security positions. I also two different one-degree of separation connections to the Clintons and current Secretary of State John Kerry. If you count my "connections" to my college professors at MIT I'm one-degree of separation away from several Manhattan Project scientists.
If you plotted out my social network to two or three links away it'd look remarkable, in some cases even disturbing. But it's not. "Connection" means almost nothing. There have been cases of people "connected" to terrorists because the frequently called the same number -- a Manhattan pizza restaurant.
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doesn't take a lot to link my circle of acquaintences to some VERY powerful people, some VERY popular celebrities, some UTTERLY DANGEROUS PSYCHOTICS, and yes, Kevin Bacon.
Here's just one run. I've sat on a couch and gotten blitzed on voddie with Adam Ant. He dated DD Winters in 1983. DD dated Prince in 1982. Prince dated Susanna Hoffs (Bangles) in 1986, during which time she found the time to knock boots with Michael J Fox. He, the ol' sly fox him, married Tracy Pollan (his Family Ties co-star in 1988 follo
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Yeah, but if you were on the list, you'd know it. Do you think the people making those lists just put 7B people on them? No, it's more than just a la Kevin Bacon.
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I must be on someone's list...
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Here's the thing though. Consider my Bandar connection; he was ambassador to the US, and has LOTS of connected and influential people -- especially in the petroleum industry. But my indirect connection could just as easily be to some radical imam who is not hobnobbing with the Bushes. That could raise a red flag, even though such an indirect connection clearly is usually meaningless.
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Crikey! (Score:2)
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Dear sweet jeebus, can we please just dismantle the TSA and give security back to the airlines, now?
So your answer to the fact that 73 people were missed because the TSA wasn't allowed to see the information that would cause those people to be scrutinized by that agency is ... to instead grant a lot of different airlines (including foreign ones operating in the US?) access to that sensitive information instead? Or would it be easier to instead remove the silo effect that allowed this to happen in the first place, over which the TSA had no control?
TSA (Score:4, Funny)
fail [fjcdn.com]
Suddenly, this isn't so funny any more.
Common problem with LE and private companies (Score:2)
is that when you ask a private company to do law enforcement and don't give them all the information they need (like CROSSAGENCY BACKGROUND CHECKS), shit will slip through the dragnet. For some strange reason, the Government won't let certain information pass into the hands of privately owned data mining concerns such as the Criminal Records Bureau and the Independent Safeguarding Authority (now conglomerated into the Disclosure & Barring Service); the information they do hold - for which they charge ex
95% of agents could bring weapons through security (Score:2)
but not fingernail clippers or water, so SUCCESS! Why do we have security again? Is it all a puppet show?
Code? What? (Score:2)
What will be done about it? (Score:2)
Ok so the question now is, what will be done about this?
The DHS discovered the fact that TSA couldn't vet these employees. The DHS made six recommendations, and the TSA agreed with the recommendations. Will President Obama, or Francis Taylor (the Acting Administrator of the TSA), or Jeh Johnson (the head of the DHS), push to fix the communication problems? Or will they just shake their heads, and worry about the political fallout?
Racetrack (Score:2)
So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
Should I care? If so why? They redacted even summary information categorizing what makes these people "suspicious". Is there any public information anyone can use to quantify the risk?
For all anyone knows "links to terrorism" means TSA employee once delivered a pizza to a network admin who prefers IS-IS to OSPF.
Have to love in a supposed free society maintenance of secret lists compiled using secret methods and criteria. A list whose names have no opportunity to know what they are even accused of let alone defend themselves.
More interesting is that nothing happened. (Score:2)
Even though they missed these obvious connections, and even though the TSA misses 95% of all threatening bottles of liquid over 3 oz.
Nothing happened.
Meanwhile, over 30,000 people died in traffic accidents in 2014.
Something is wrong here.
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Everyone working for the TSA is a potential terrorist, 73 are one some list somewhere.
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This.
And of the 73 on a list somewhere; i bet only a fraction are even slightly a threat; and i hope they don't lose their job simply because some distant uncle who sends them a gift on their birthday attended a rally where some actual terrorists also went...
Re: (Score:2)
Or perhaps the same inter-departmental politics are still going on? Agencies don't trust one another and are reluctant to share information, for fear that the other guy will take credit. Same reason the NSA was set up - to solve bickering between the FBI and the CIA. Yeah, well, that didn't turn out so well either.
Re: (Score:2)
Their working up to making one three-letter-agency that operates as a secret police force.
Re: (Score:2)
Are people being rounded up at night and disappeared?
No, we haven't gotten there yet. Patience, all will be revealed in due time.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, let's list everything so the enemies can know exactly how to stay off the lists. Idiot.