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Screening the Screeners Isn't Enough to Ensure Airport Security

Huge Gaps Remain in Surveillance of Employees and Contractors

By Dan Schlossberg
ConsumerAffairs.com

March 19, 2007

Airport Security • TSA Suspends "Clear" Program After Laptop Theft • TSA's Air Cargo Plans Questioned • TSA Stops ShoeScanner In Its Tracks • New Controversy Dogs TSA Chief • TSA Worries About Terrorist 'Rehearsals' • "Registered Traveler" Expands to More Airports • Lighters, Breast Milk Get TSA's OK • JFK Airport Plot Renews Calls for Worker Screening • Future Security Could Feature Facial Photos • Bush May Veto Airport Screening Machines • Competition Comes to Registered Traveler Services • TSA Dragnet Aims to Block Potential Threats • Screening the Screeners Isn't Enough to Ensure Airport Security • Naked City Comes to Life in Phoenix Airport • TSA Adds Security Checks for Airport Employees

Screening the screeners is just a start in plugging a gaping loophole in airport security: more than 800,000 people nationwide have unrestricted access to airplanes.

Mechanics, fuel specialists, baggage handlers, and a host of other workers employed by airports and airlines don't have to submit to the same screening as passengers and flight crews.

That creates the potential for big problems.

Just two weeks ago, a Comair employee at Orlando International was arrested in San Juan after arriving aboard a Delta flight with 14 guns and a cache of marijuana that weighed eight pounds. Three accomplices were also arrested.

The same airport, which serves 34.8 million passengers per year and has 16,000 employees, has also had recent problems with unguarded doors and unshredded documents – both potential windfalls for terrorists.

The documents, found in an airport dumpster, included vital security information, including maps of fuel storage facilities, security fences, and electric and telephone lines, as well as details of airport expansion plans and traffic projections through the year 2022.

Aviation security expert Larry Johnson, a former director of the State Department's counterterrorism office, told the Orlando Sentinel that the 652-page master plan would make "an excellent document for terrorists planning an attack."

Airport officials are investigating how and why the sensitive documents were dumped so carelessly.

At the same time, they are arguing with the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) about responsibility for leaving employee doors unguarded for the last six months. The TSA had been guarding the doors before that in the wake of a 2004 drug bust that also involved guns.

Both parties agree that the unguarded doors may have been used in the March 5 security breach that led to the arrest in Puerto Rico of 22-year-old Comair employee Thomas Anthony Munoz. He was paid $5,000 to carry a duffel bag full of contraband onto Delta flight 933.

In the wake of the problems at Orlando, the TSA has assigned 160 additional officers to five airports: Orlando, Ft. Lauderdale, Miami, Tampa, and San Juan.

While those screeners will make only random checks of airport and airline employees, Orlando International plans to spend $5 million for a permanent program of employee screenings.

That's the same amount Miami International currently spends for a 9-year-old program that has dramatically reduced smuggling by employees. Under that program, all airport and airline employees are screened, though not in the same areas as passengers or flight crews.

The Miami program also includes a new wrinkle that allows screeners to instantly send suspicious images to a New York center that operates around the clock with a staff of former NYPD bomb technicians.

Although the TSA conducts background checks on airport and airline employees, low pay makes some susceptible to bribes. That is why screening of screeners (and others) is so vital.

How to do it, however, remains subject to conjecture. At London's Heathrow, for example, employees use ID cards but still have to get through several checkpoints. At Israel's Ben-Gurion airport, agents rely on intuition, odd behavior, and nervousness as well as thorough searches and, to some extent, racial profiling.

In the United States, however, Miami, Orlando, and most of the other 450 commercial airports bank heavily on technology over personality. Travel industry officials hope that will be sufficient to ward off a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that caused four fatal crashes and thousands of casualties.

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