An Ignoble Experiment

2. TSA drops the ball on checkpoint screening drills

The head of the Transportation Security Administration defended his agency for finding San Jose International Airport to be in compliance with security requirements a few weeks before a teenager scaled a fence and stowed away in an airplane.

Compliance with security requirements doesn't guarantee that there will be no breaches, John Pistole said April 30 during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing. "The question is, do they work at every instance? And there's no 100 percent solution here."

On April 20, 15-year-old Yahya Abdi climbed a perimeter fence at the San Jose airport, stowed away in the wheel well of a plane, and managed to survive the flight to Hawaii.

At the hearing, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) repeatedly criticized TSA for finding the airport's security measures, including perimeter security, to be in compliance following an 82-hour inspection only weeks before the incident.

"You cleared these people, and that is wrong," she said.

"I think you're drawing the wrong conclusion," Pistole replied. "It's not a guarantee that nothing bad will ever happen."

Pistole agreed that the San Jose incident was a serious breach and that there was room for improvement, such as broader coverage by video surveillance. Cameras did not capture Abdi climbing over the airport's perimeter fence.

TSA has been reviewing the incident "almost nonstop" since it learned of it, he added.

For more:
- go to the hearing webpage (webcast and prepared testimonies available)

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By Zach Rausnitz

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3. DOE 'exacerbated' lax safety culture tied to nuclear waste accident

Nearly half the airports with advanced imaging machines, which scan passengers for nonmetallic threats, reported no checkpoint drill results at all from March 2011 through February 2013.

The Transportation Security Administration conducts checkpoint drills to train officers to detect improvised explosive devices. In a report released April 30, the Government Accountability Office says that if TSA collected data on the drills from its airport personnel, it would learn how well the advanced imaging machines actually work.

The checkpoint drills are mandatory, and by not collecting data on whether they occurred and their results, TSA fails to ensure that airports conduct the drills, the report says.

TSA officials told the GAO that the reason it did not collect results and ensure compliance was because it's unclear which office within the agency is responsible for doing so.

While half of airports that use advanced imaging machines did report IED drill results to TSA during the two-year period that GAO reviewed, the number of drills varied from just one to as many as 8,645.

But still, about 80 percent of the reported drills used metal detectors instead of advanced imaging machines, the report says.

For more:
- download the report, GAO-14-357 (pdf)

Read more about: airport security, GAO report
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By Zach Rausnitz

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4. Coast Guard, Southcom leaders: Drug war efforts underrecognized, underfunded

Independent investigators within the Energy Department blame the department for worsening the safety culture at a nuclear waste facility where radioactive material leaked into the environment in February.

The incident occurred at a DOE nuclear waste storage facility near Carlsbad, New Mexico. Radioactive material escaped from an underground repository, through an exhaust duct and directly into the atmosphere.

The department appointed an accident investigation board, whose report (pdf) says that "DOE has exacerbated the safety culture problem" at the facility, because the department measured safety performance by the number of reports of deficiencies – instead of the significance of the issues.

"Directly tying performance to the number of occurrence reports drives the contractor to non-disclosure of events in order to avoid the poor score," the report says.

The facility has its own safety culture problems.

Workers there told investigators that they did not feel comfortable identifying safety issues, and that management does not welcome questioning attitudes.

The DOE's Carlsbad field office and the contractor that operates the facility "allowed the safety culture at [the facility] to deteriorate," the report says.

The direct cause of the incident in February was a poorly designed ventilation system. Air filters failed to contain the radioactive material that entered the atmosphere through an exhaust duct.

For more:
- download the report, "Radiological Release Event at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant on February 14, 2014" (pdf)

Read more about: nuclear waste, DoE
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By Zach Rausnitz

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5. DOE: Energy sector should pare down IT components, access

The heads of the Coast Guard and Southern Command said April 29 that their counternarcotics efforts are far more cost-effective than those of domestic law enforcement, even though the latter receive the bulk of the funding.

Joint Interagency Task Force South, which is part of Southcom and includes the Coast Guard, military services and other agencies, seizes the majority of the cocaine bound for the United States, said Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly, the Southcom commander. Yet it receives only 1.5 percent of the federal government's total counternarcotics budget, he said.

Kelly spoke at a House hearing held jointly by a Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee and a Foreign Affairs subcommittee.

Commandant Adm. Robert Papp, who appeared alongside Kelly, said that in the past five years, the Coast Guard seized more than twice the amount of cocaine as all domestic law enforcement agencies – federal, state and local – combined.

The two said it's more effective to interdict bulk drug shipments than to wait until they reach Mexico or the United States, at which point they are broken up into progressively smaller shipments. Authorities can also learn more about drug trafficking networks when they catch traffickers at sea than when they encounter local distributors in the United States.

They suggested that the Coast Guard and Southcom receive disproportionately small slices of federal counternarcotics funding, compared to domestic law enforcement.

"Why do you get so little of that?" asked Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.). "Do they have better lobbyists than you do?"

Papp declined to speculate, saying, "That's a real great grenade to jump on," and adding that domestic law enforcement has an important role to play in reducing demand.

Kelly, however, offered his view.

"I'd guess because we've tended to look at this issue as the cancer that's within our country," he said. "We look at it and we say, 'Well, this is terrible. Let's try to solve this problem at home.'"

For more:
- go to the hearing webpage (webcast and prepared testimony available)

Read more about: Coast Guard, counternarcotics
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By Zach Rausnitz

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