Passenger Screeners Fail Undercover Tests

"It's still a very poor system," House Aviation Subcommittee Chairman John Mica, R-Fla., told United Press International in an interview Thursday. "It needs a dramatic overhaul."

"The performance level (of screeners) is not acceptable," he went on. "A major and continuing problem is the ability of the system to detect weapons and explosives."

Mica was commenting following a classified briefing Wednesday by investigators from the General Accounting Office. He and other members of the subcommittee were told of efforts by investigators to test the system, Mica said.

He would not comment further, but other congressional sources confirmed that the tests included efforts to smuggle real and simulated weapons and explosives aboard passenger aircraft.

Mica said that the results of the tests were classified, but they were clearly not encouraging. The GAO's comments "raised serious concern among many members," he said.

He added that the subcommittee had formally requested that Adm. James Loy -- who runs the Transportation Security Administration, which employs passenger screeners -- and his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, meet with GAO officials to discuss the results of their inquiry.

TSA officials declined to comment about the testing, citing security. "It wouldn't make sense to make public how we're trying to beat the system," spokeswoman Chris Rhatigan told UPI.

The GAO also released a public report Thursday raising a different but closely related set of concerns about the training and performance monitoring of screeners by the TSA.

A GAO official said the inquiry was continuing, and that they had taken the "highly unusual step" of issuing an interim report at Mica's request.

The interim report found that although the TSA said it recognizes the importance of continuing on-the-job training for screeners and special training for their supervisors, "TSA has not fully developed or deployed recurrent or supervisory training programs."

It also said there was no proper system for evaluating screener performance in detecting hidden weapons or other "threat objects" on a day-to-day basis, although the TSA did conduct its own testing by undercover operatives.

"We try to break our system so the terrorists can't," said Rhatigan, adding that any time a screener failed, there was "instant feedback" from testers and management on the spot.

The frequency, success rate and methodology of the tests are all classified, but Rhatigan did say that the tests were "always covert, always unannounced ... to test our screeners to the max."

She said that 3 percent of the 50,000-strong screener workforce had been terminated because their performance was not up to scratch. Some of these firings had been initiated because of whistle blowing by TSA employees. "There were cases that required us to take an extra look and sometimes make an adjustment," she said.

Mica, a longtime critic of the decision to make passenger screeners federal employees, attributed at least some of the failures to the fact that they were part of "a huge government bureaucracy."

"What we need," he said, "is federal oversight and standards and auditing of private firms contracted by the airports."

The TSA is running five pilot projects at airports around the country on more or less this basis, and airports will be able to apply to opt out of the federal screener program and hire their own after November 2004. But the GAO found that TSA had yet to start work on either evaluating the private screeners performance or working out how to handle the transition next fall.

"They haven't done anything to prepare," said the GAO official, "there are a lot of questions." Among them is the question of liability of airports and screener contractors if they failed to prevent the hijacking or destruction of a plane.

Rhatigan dismissed these concerns. "We still have more than a year" before the opt out starts, she said, adding that the TSA's performance on all fronts was improving.

"We're better today than we were yesterday and we'll be better tomorrow than we are today," she said.