Clean House at the TSA

If there has been an epic failure since the Christmas Day attack, it has been the actions and attitude of the TSA, the agency created after 9/11 to run airport and airline security.

The TSA didn't bother to alert all flights over U.S. skies when it learned about the attack, inexplicably choosing to limit disclosure only to pilots operating flights en route from international destinations. It then imposed draconian new rules for passenger behavior on international flights headed to the United States, but never informed flyers of the disruptive new regulations. Then it harassed and subpoenaed at least two of the bloggers who posted the new standards of passenger behavior. It created chaos at security checkpoints around the world by ordering screeners to paw over carry-on bags even though the Underwear Bomber didn't sneak anything aboard in his carry-on bag. And, on Sunday, it issued new rules for flights and citizens from certain international destinations that are being ignored and ridiculed by other nations.

The TSA is bloated and ineffective and, like most bureaucracies, distracted. Its employees are ill trained for the greater task at hand. Its bosses, holdover George W. Bush-era functionaries, have an eight-year record of mishandling passenger data, wasting billions on technology that doesn't work, and, worst of all, treating honest flyers as potential perpetrators who must be policed rather than protected. When President Obama finally gets a nominee for TSA administrator past obstructionist Republicans in the Senate, the new boss needs to clean house, rethink the mission, and restructure how the agency operates.

Revive Trusted Traveler

One of the TSA's most egregious actions in recent years was strangling "trusted traveler," a concept built into the same bill that created the TSA in November 2001. The idea was that a hefty percentage of travelers could be voluntarily profiled in advance, trusted not to be terrorists, and be moved quickly through airport checkpoints. Moreover, the trusted-travel program would be run by private enterprise, thus offering a counterweight to the newly created TSA bureaucracy.

Trusted traveler made sense after 9/11, and it makes even more sense now that the TSA is again creating huge traffic jams at airport-security checkpoints. Crowds of shoeless and distracted travelers waiting obediently in long queues make a tempting target for terrorists. There's little to stop a terrorist from bringing a bomb or firearms into an airport terminal, walking up to the security checkpoint, and attacking the defenseless lines of waiting travelers. A well-run trusted-traveler program would not only cut congestion at security checkpoints, thus eliminating a target for terrorists, it would permit TSA screeners to pay more attention to potential security risks trying to gain entrance to passenger aircraft.

The Fine Print…

One more way to manage security better: Don't bow before technology. The sudden demand for more "full-body scanners" to replace existing screening systems is not a foolproof solution. There are legitimate privacy issues; worries about the radiation some of the machines emit; cost-benefit considerations; and real concerns about the devices' actual effectiveness. And just to throw politics and money into the mix, consider this: Former Bush Administration Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has given a series of interviews in recent weeks espousing more TSA purchases of full-body scanners. But Chertoff's consulting firm represents one of the major manufacturers of the scanners, a fact he rarely discloses when he's identified only as the former DHS secretary and a supposed expert on terrorism.