When the Transportation Security Administration was founded in 2001, in response to the 9/11 terror attacks, Senator Tom Daschle (D-SD) famously stated, “You can’t professionalize if you don’t federalize.” While that statement, especially given the benefit of hindsight is giggle-inducing, today’s shows of security theater at the nation’s airports are making Senator Daschle’s remarks even more nonsensical.
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Case in point: On November 26, A 57-year-old Russian woman was able not only to slip into an airport in New York but also to board a flight from New York to Paris with no passport or boarding pass. Granted, the TSA isn’t in charge of who boards the plane once people are admitted into the airport, so there’s plenty of blame to go around here.
The suspect, identified as Svetlana Dali, appeared in Brooklyn federal court on Friday and is facing one count of being a stowaway on a vessel or aircraft without consent, according to CNN. Dali reportedly exploited a security weakness at New York’s Kennedy International Airport on Nov. 26, slipping past airline employees who did not ask for her boarding pass on a fully booked flight, according to The New York Times.
“This was a lot of failures in one day,” former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation Mary Schiavo told the outlet. “The system is lucky that she wasn’t apparently intending to do harm to the plane or the passengers.”
By Wednesday, the 57-year-old had safely returned to the U.S. after being caught and deported. She was promptly arrested by the FBI, CNN reported.
The system is lucky? I’d say the planes’ passengers and crew were lucky. If this woman somehow was able to evade not only the “professionalized” TSA but also to board the aircraft without a boarding pass, she would have been able to evade and board while carrying any manner of weapons or other contraband.
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This wasn’t just a screw-up. It was a systemic failure of grand proportions. It was a failure that could have yielded disastrous consequences.
During the seven-hour flight to Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport, Dali allegedly avoided the plane’s crew by hiding in the bathrooms, The New York Times reported. In a criminal complaint filed with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Dali said “that she did not have a plane ticket and that she intentionally evaded TSA security officials and Delta employees so that she could travel without buying one.”
It’s certain there will be an investigation as to how this happened, of course, just as it’s certain that certain results of that investigation will never be made public, on the old stage-magician theory of “If I told, then anyone could do it.”
See Related: TSA to Passenger: Are Your Pants Full of Snakes or Are You Just Happy to See Us?
I’ve often wondered why we need the TSA. Previously, security screening was handled by the airports and airlines. Yes, on 9/11, there were failures in screening, as the terrorists were allowed to board carrying box cutters. There were also failures in immigration screening and in many more areas, but we might remember: Hindsight is always 20-20. It’s unclear as to why we need to have an entire federal administration to do this when the airports and airlines handled it very well for many decades — and there’s no reason that we can’t have certain legal guidelines security contractors should abide by, like “Don’t let people carry box cutters on to airplanes.”
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Some of the post-9/11 security measures make some sense. Locking cockpit doors is one of them. But too much of what goes on in our airports is not security; it is security theater, a theater that at times requires the “random” frisking of little old ladies and toddlers. Maybe Elon and Vivek need to add TSA to the DOGE list — for reform, at the very least.
