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USA: TSA remains terrible at securing transportation, Homeland Security internal report shows.
Evidence has shown the TSA needs to get lucky to actually stop anyone. That’s backed up by a new report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General — its internal department watchdog, more or less — details of which were shared (PDF) with the US House Committee on Oversight and Government by IG John Roth. Basically none of it was good. The IG sent auditors, who were not trained in counterintelligence or how to evade the TSA’s checks, to a number of different airports across the country. The systematic failures in TSA security checks were consistent across every airport, with auditors seeing 95 percent success rates smuggling bombs and guns into secure areas of airports. From IG Roth’s prepared statement to the Committee:
Our testing was designed to test checkpoint operations in real world conditions. It was not designed to test specific, discrete segments of checkpoint operations, but rather the system as a whole. The failures included failures in the technology, failures in TSA procedures, and human error. We found layers of security simply missing. It would be misleading to minimize the rigor of our testing, or to imply that our testing was not an accurate reflection of the effectiveness of the totality of aviation security.
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Source: The Verge.