Don’t miss the point.
The gaps in security prove TSA is a joke.
How many hundreds of millions do we give to fund this joke? And how much real security is lost because time is wasted with the TSA?
Terrorism will not be stopped by the TSA—it will happen because of the TSA if they don’t get their act together. To save our country we need to replace this joke with old fashioned military intelligence and law enforcement. Intelligent law enforcement—the kind that profiles.
the whole administration is a joke. Nevertheless you don’t expose security flaws to your enemies.
I understand the point. I was exploring the concept of, when is it OK to make security gaps public, possibly ones terrorists might use. The consensus answer here seems to be, anytime, with no consequences, because it helps things. That discussion led to two instances of Godwin’s Law being invoked.
When the person is an insider the leak concerns me more since may will assume that a pilot is aware of all of the levels of security and how it all fits together, which is not the case but lends credence and authority to the leak. Having someone else do your site survey for you is one less step in taking action.
And, I know what I’d do if I had a trusted employee casing my company and publishing exploitable vulnerabilities! Over all of his protests that he’s actually helping me, I’d make sure that his access to any more information was cut off immediately! That’s been my experience in industry, like the electronic game industry, to aerospace contractors, and the irradiation facility I mentioned above.
TSA comes up with specific responses to specific threats (real, theoretical, or imagined), overlaid with some good-intention might-be-a-good-idea general screening/security, then gets that run through Congress and the airlines association and all the unions. The result is a Charlie Foxtrot mishmash of stuff implemented and performed by people that are really good at following scripts and who are given almost no flexibility to change the script. It sucks, but it is the best we can cobble together until we can get some real reform and some “leaders” in Washington that actually like the USA and the citizens who live in it. Mapping blueprints of the holes and gaps certainly won’t help because, as I mentioned above, even if TSA tried to fix things, the bad guys can respond much quicker than TSA can ever dream of.
I think Congress should get out of the loop except to provide money to airports and airlines to hire private security firms whose metric is security and safety, not earmarks and CYA and counting how many people in your department.