TSA boss pulls back the curtain

Wow - here’s an excerpt from a very interesting interview with TSA administrator Kip Hawley from schneier.com:

The stories about 90% failures are wrong or extremely misleading. We do many kinds of effectiveness tests at checkpoints daily. We use them to guide training and decisions on technology and operating procedures. We also do extensive and very sophisticated Red Team testing, and one of their jobs is to observe checkpoints and go back and figure out — based on inside knowledge of what we do — ways to beat the system. They isolate one particular thing: for example, a particular explosive, made and placed in a way that exploits a particular weakness in technology; our procedures; or the way TSOs (transportation safety officers) do things in practice. Then they will test that particular thing over and over until they identify what corrective action is needed. We then change technology or procedure, or plain old focus on execution. And we repeat the process — forever.

This is supposed to be a multi-parter; we’ll try to keep an eye on it and keep excerpting it day by day. Here’s the Schneier blog front page which will have the latest - part two is already up.

And here’s a guest blog Hawley wrote in late spring for the Aviation Week.