TSA watchdog spills secret behind long airport lines
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson warns air travelers to prepare for much longer than usual airport security lines, but a Transportation Security Administration watchdog says this mess is simply a matter of the government failing to manage its resources responsibly.
On Monday, Johnson stood at Ronald Reagan National Airport just outside Washington and told passengers to expect longer than expected wait times as the Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, expedites hundreds of new personnel into service to speed up the security process. In Chicago, passengers were told to arrive three hours prior to departure.
The TSA claims congressional action has led to the elimination of some 4,500 personnel over the past few years and the agency simply doesn’t have the manpower to keep up, but that’s just spin according to Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute. He also run Cato’s Downsizing Government blog.
Edwards told WND and Radio America the TSA is littered with problems, starting with its existing personnel.
“Annual surveys of federal government employees find that the TSA and the broader Homeland Security Department have some of the poorest morale in the federal government,” Edwards said. “The TSA has a high turnover rate for their screeners, which is not good for morale and is not good for security.”
But perhaps even worse is TSA’s penchant for directing its ever-increasing budget into the wrong areas.
“TSA has spent many billions of dollars on things that don’t work,” Edwards said. “As a result, they’ve starved their budget from hiring more screeners to reduce congestion.”
He said the most glaring example is one of TSA’s most controversial projects.
“Remember those full-body scanning machines that were in airports for years that essentially showed nude pictures of passengers as they got screened?” asked Edwards.
“Those things were eventually withdrawn because of civil liberties concerns. People didn’t want to see their nude bodies when they went to the airport. But those things have been found to not really work at all. It’s fairly easy to slip guns and plastic explosives through those machines.”
Listen to the WND/Radio America interview with Chris Edwards:
Another major problem, Edwards said, is the inability of such a large bureaucracy to adapt to differing needs at different airports.
“As a government bureaucracy, the TSA has a very inflexible workforce,” he said. “Unlike a private company, where if they saw one of their facilities or one of their cities get a lot more business and a lot more demand, they’d move workers over there. They’d hire more part-time workers to fill surges in demand. Government bureaucracies don’t do that. They have fixed numbers of people at these airports, and they don’t adjust them like any normal private business would.”
He said airports do have the option to boot the TSA and go with private security. He said only 15-20 airports do that and actually perform better when secret tests are conducted to see whether weapons or explosive materials get past security.
“Airports are allowed to opt out of TSA screening, and some of them have been looking at that recently because of the huge congestion at the airports,” Edwards said.
He said things work much more smoothly north of the border.
“In Canada, all major airports have private screening,” Edwards explained. “There’s a number of different expert companies that specialize in airport screening. They get three-year contracts to do particular airports. If they don’t do a good job, if they don’t have high security, they get fired. The next time around, a different company gets the contract.”
While U.S. airports do have the ability to ditch the TSA and hire private security, Edwards said the Obama administration is making it much tougher to do that.
“Congress has had to slap down the administration a few times to get it to allow airports to go private,” he said. “In the original legislation that created TSA, House Republicans slipped in this provision that airports could petition the Department of Transportation to go private, but the Obama administration has made that very difficult.”
On Monday, Johnson stood at Ronald Reagan National Airport just outside Washington and told passengers to expect longer than expected wait times as the Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, expedites hundreds of new personnel into service to speed up the security process. In Chicago, passengers were told to arrive three hours prior to departure.
The TSA claims congressional action has led to the elimination of some 4,500 personnel over the past few years and the agency simply doesn’t have the manpower to keep up, but that’s just spin according to Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute. He also run Cato’s Downsizing Government blog.
Edwards told WND and Radio America the TSA is littered with problems, starting with its existing personnel.
“Annual surveys of federal government employees find that the TSA and the broader Homeland Security Department have some of the poorest morale in the federal government,” Edwards said. “The TSA has a high turnover rate for their screeners, which is not good for morale and is not good for security.”
But perhaps even worse is TSA’s penchant for directing its ever-increasing budget into the wrong areas.
“TSA has spent many billions of dollars on things that don’t work,” Edwards said. “As a result, they’ve starved their budget from hiring more screeners to reduce congestion.”
He said the most glaring example is one of TSA’s most controversial projects.
“Remember those full-body scanning machines that were in airports for years that essentially showed nude pictures of passengers as they got screened?” asked Edwards.
“Those things were eventually withdrawn because of civil liberties concerns. People didn’t want to see their nude bodies when they went to the airport. But those things have been found to not really work at all. It’s fairly easy to slip guns and plastic explosives through those machines.”
Listen to the WND/Radio America interview with Chris Edwards:
Another major problem, Edwards said, is the inability of such a large bureaucracy to adapt to differing needs at different airports.
“As a government bureaucracy, the TSA has a very inflexible workforce,” he said. “Unlike a private company, where if they saw one of their facilities or one of their cities get a lot more business and a lot more demand, they’d move workers over there. They’d hire more part-time workers to fill surges in demand. Government bureaucracies don’t do that. They have fixed numbers of people at these airports, and they don’t adjust them like any normal private business would.”
He said airports do have the option to boot the TSA and go with private security. He said only 15-20 airports do that and actually perform better when secret tests are conducted to see whether weapons or explosive materials get past security.
“Airports are allowed to opt out of TSA screening, and some of them have been looking at that recently because of the huge congestion at the airports,” Edwards said.
He said things work much more smoothly north of the border.
“In Canada, all major airports have private screening,” Edwards explained. “There’s a number of different expert companies that specialize in airport screening. They get three-year contracts to do particular airports. If they don’t do a good job, if they don’t have high security, they get fired. The next time around, a different company gets the contract.”
While U.S. airports do have the ability to ditch the TSA and hire private security, Edwards said the Obama administration is making it much tougher to do that.
“Congress has had to slap down the administration a few times to get it to allow airports to go private,” he said. “In the original legislation that created TSA, House Republicans slipped in this provision that airports could petition the Department of Transportation to go private, but the Obama administration has made that very difficult.”
http://www.wnd.com/2016/05/tsa-watchdog-spills-secret-behind-long-airport-lines/
Nightmare Russian facial recognition app is one step closer to the end of privacy
While facial recognition technology has a number of positive uses, such as finding missing people, an alternative form of ID, and even tagging friends on Facebook, it does have worrying implications when it comes to privacy.
In Russia, a new face recognition app is becoming so popular that it could result in the end of public anonymity, according to a report in The Guardian.
FindFace, which launched two months ago, lets users take a photo of a crowd and work out individuals' identities with 70 percent reliability. It does this by using image recognition technology to compare faces against profile pictures on Vkontakte, a Facebook-style social media site that has 200 million users.
The app already boasts 500,000 users and has performed nearly 3 million searches. Though currently limited to Russia, the app’s creators, Artem Kukharenko and Alexander Kabakov, imagine a world where the app is used by everyone to examine strangers’ social network profiles just by taking a photo of them on the street.
Kabakov has suggested that the app could have applications when it comes to 'dating'. “If you see someone you like, you can photograph them, find their identity, and then send them a friend request,” he said. “It also looks for similar people. So you could just upload a photo of a movie star you like, or your ex, and then find 10 girls who look similar to her and send them messages.” It sounds like creepy stalkers everywhere will soon have a reason to rejoice.
Other than tracking down Scarlett Johansson lookalikes and harassing random women you find attractive, the app’s already found other uses. The creators are about to sign a deal with the Moscow city government to implement the technology into 150,000 CCTV cameras. Should a crime be committed, the faces of everyone in the area will be checked against photos from various records, including social media sites, to determine if they're a possible suspect.
FindFace’s Orwellian nightmare scenario is already rearing its head. Recently, the app was used to find the profiles of Russian sex workers and porn actresses so trolls could harass them and send messages to their friends and families. And the fact it’s so popular in Russia, a country not known for respecting the privacy rights of its citizens, is a big concern.
Kabakov also envisions the technology being used in the retail sector. He talks about a shop CCTV camera capturing a person looking at a product, such as a laptop, and then the retailer identifying the individual and bombarding them with adverts for laptops – probably until they go out and buy one.
As for the big question of whether the app can access Facebook’s image database: no, it can’t. Not right now, at least. The creators say the US site stores photos in a way that is harder to access than Vkontakte, so lets hope things stay this way.
In addressing people’s privacy fears, Kabakov goes with the ‘it’s just the way things are, so get used to it’ argument: “In today’s world we are surrounded by gadgets. Our phones, televisions, fridges, everything around us is sending real-time information about us. Already we have full data on people’s movements, their interests and so on. A person should understand that in the modern world he is under the spotlight of technology. You just have to live with that.”
To discover more about FindFace, check out the video below, which somehow manages to be as sinister as the app itself.
http://www.techspot.com/news/64857-nightmare-russian-facial-recognition-app-one-step-closer.html
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