Congressman: Secret Report On TSA Pat Downs, Body Scanner Failures Will “Knock Your Socks Off”“Off the charts” failure rate “sort of like the record of the Marx BrothersOctober 25, 2011
The chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which oversees the TSA, has asserted that the release of a classified report on TSA security failures will renew calls for the replacement of the agency with private airport security personnel.
“The failure rate (for body scanning equipment) is classified but it would absolutely knock your socks off,” Florida Republican, Rep. John L. Mica told reporters during a briefing Monday.
Mica also asserted that recorded instances of pat downs failing to detect contraband are “off the charts.” This information is also currently still classified, but is due to be released within weeks as part of an upcoming committee report on the TSA’s first decade.
Mica suggested that the TSA’s performance report would read “sort of like the record of the Marx Brothers”.
The TSA has withheld results of its official security tests, despite repeated requests to release the information under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Department of Homeland Security has classified the results of the most recent random, covert “red team tests,” where undercover agents try to see what they can get past airport security. The reason they have done so, according to MIca, is because the results have been so shockingly and consistently bad for the past nine years.
Mica further slammed the TSA Monday, ripping into the agency’s latest experimental security “chat down” procedure.
The chairman referred to the pilot program of “behaviour detection” being tested at Boston Logan airport as an “idiotic mess”.
Describing the program as a poor man’s version of Israeli interrogation security techniques, Mica noted that that the pilot is merely an extension of an already existing program that the Government Accountability Office concluded had little scientific credibility and had cost “a quarter billion” in hiring additional TSA officers.
“This is no joke,” Mica told reporters at the briefing, adding that he had personally visited Logan airport and witnessed first hand the failures of the program.
“I put my ear up and listened to some idiotic questions,” Mica said of the “chat down” procedure, also noting that TSA officers expressed a lack of understanding of the program they had supposedly been trained to engage in.
“I talked to them about their training, which was minimal,” Mica said, adding “It’s almost idiotic… It’s still not a risk-based system. It’s not a thinking system.”
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