'Security' Without Sense

It has been almost two months since I resigned from the Department of Homeland Security's Transportation Security Administration (TSA). I had served as a security screener at Dulles International Airport for more than three years.

Even now, I can scarcely believe some of the absurdities I experienced as a screener. Not long before I quit, for example, a teenage girl was flying to Australia for a field hockey tournament. She was stopped at my checkpoint and told that she could not carry her stick onto the aircraft.

I believe in prudent security, but the field hockey stick presented no realistic threat to passengers or crew. It was too late for the stick to be checked, so the girl had to send it Federal Express to Australia and hope for the best.

Ironically, less than an hour later, a rather large man with a cane passed through my checkpoint without a problem. The cane had a heavy brass grip, I remember, because I had to hand it back to the man after he passed through the metal detector.

I'm not saying that the TSA should have confiscated the man's cane; it shouldn't have. What I am saying is that the TSA's policies regarding what is acceptable to carry onto an airplane mock security rather than enhance it.

Cigarette lighters were another issue for screeners. Congress passed legislation banning lighters from aircraft last year, but the TSA uses no common sense in applying the policy. It bans all lighters from aircraft -- even if they are inside checked baggage.

I saw World War II veterans returning from anniversary observances in Europe with commemorative lighters -- in unopened, wrapped packages without lighter fluid -- have their lighters taken away. For the record, matches are allowed on aircraft.

In a memorandum that marked the third anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the federal security director lauded the screening force at Dulles for intercepting 12.4 million "prohibited items" since the TSA's inception. But how many of those items were field hockey sticks, cigarette lighters and cuticle scissors?

The TSA makes passengers who are carrying clear plastic bottles of drinking water place their bottles on the X-ray belt, even though it is easier to eyeball the bottle than to examine it through the machine. The TSA also has been employing something it calls a "spot team"; teams of uniformed screeners stand idle during busy times at the checkpoint, observing from a distance the same passengers who will pass through the checkpoints and be observed up close by other screeners.

The agency's management, in an effort to stop so many screeners from quitting, has embarked on a campaign called "I am TSA." Management changed the screener's job title from Transportation Security Screener to Transportation Security Officer and plans to distribute "I am TSA" pins to screeners, I mean, officers. This initiative, however, seems unlikely to lower attrition rates.

Visitors to Dulles see posters at the checkpoints with the word "WARNING" in large red letters, followed by the information that "passengers are advised that the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security has determined that Bandara Ngurah Rai International Airport, Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia, and Port au Prince International Airport, Haiti, do not maintain and administer effective aviation security measures." That's good to know, but what about Washington Dulles International Airport?

At Dulles, an entry point to the "sterile" area, the part of the airport supposedly restricted to those who have gone through a security check, is known as the SIDA door (SIDA stands for Security Identification Display Area). Workers with airport badges can pass through this door with knapsacks, book bags, you name it, without going through the TSA checkpoints upstairs. But pilots, flight attendants and TSA employees -- all of whom have passed background checks before being hired -- are not permitted to access the sterile area through the SIDA door. They must go through the same TSA checkpoints used by passengers.

The Department of Homeland Security might want to address an issue such as the SIDA door at Dulles before warning travelers about Bali and Port au Prince.

At the TSA, truth indeed is stranger than fiction.

-- Scott Wallace