TSA can find the genitals in your pants just fine (it’s the gun they’ll have trouble locating)

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Matthew Mosk, Angela Hill, and Timothy Fleming write for ABC about gaping holes in airline “security,” thanks to the hamburger clerks working “security” at the airports, with test bombs and guns being missed by screeners 20 out of 22 times at Newark. We know about these failures thanks to the “Red Teams,” about which we’ve written at TSA News before. From the ABC article:​

Last fall, as he had done hundreds of times, Iranian-American businessman Farid Seif passed through security at a Houston airport and boarded an international flight.​

He didn’t realize he had forgotten to remove the loaded snub nose “baby” Glock pistol from his computer bag. But TSA officers never noticed as his bag glided along the belt and was x-rayed. When he got to his hotel after the three-hour flight, he was shocked to discover the gun traveled unnoticed from Houston.​

“It’s just impossible to miss it, you know. I mean, this is not a small gun,” Seif told ABC News. “How can you miss it? You cannot miss it.”​

But the TSA did miss it, and despite what most people believe about the painstaking effort to screen airline passengers and their luggage before they enter the terminal, it wasn’t that unusual.​

Experts tell ABC News that every year since the September 11 terror attacks, federal agencies have conducted random, covert “red team tests,” where undercover agents try to see just how much they can get past security checks at major U.S. airports. And while the Department of Homeland Security closely guards the results as classified, those that have leaked in media reports have been shocking.​

According to one report, undercover TSA agents testing security at a Newark airport terminal on one day in 2006 found that TSA screeners failed to detect concealed bombs and guns 20 out of 22 times. A 2007 government audit leaked to USA Today revealed that undercover agents were successful slipping simulated explosives and bomb parts through Los Angeles’s LAX airport in 50 out of 70 attempts, and at Chicago’s O’Hare airport agents made 75 attempts and succeeded in getting through undetected 45 times.​

Feel safer with the TSA at the airport? If so, is it because your IQ is commensurate with the speed limit?

Of course, a gun won’t bring down a plane — even a bomb won’t necessarily bring down a plane — but once you get a jobs program in place for unskilled workers, and one that makes the Michael Chertoffs of the world beaucoup bucks to boot, well . . . just remember that the foremost job of any bureaucracy is to protect itself.​

(Photo: Rob Bixby/Flickr Creative Commons)​