July 29, 2015

New TSA chief, longer lines

Washington Post - The new chief of the Transportation Security Administration is planning to retrain officers on monitoring for weapons and contraband and to limit expedited screening as a means of managing long lines, Ron Nixon reports in The New York Times. He writes that officers and their supervisors at airports nationwide have made reducing wait times their main goal, instead of security.

Peter V. Neffenger, a former Coast Guard admiral who took charge this month after the agency flunked a security audit, told Nixon that safety must come before convenience. "Efficiency and getting people through airport security lines cannot be our sole reason that makes you take your eyes off the reason for the mission," he said.

More rigorous screening will make security even more of a hassle for travelers, and inevitably, more of them will miss their flights. Whether it will also make the nation safer from terrorism is an open question. As Wonkblog has previously reported, the limited data available suggests that in response to security at airports, terrorists just carry out their attacks elsewhere, and no lives are saved on the whole.

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