The Weakest Link

Air security is only as good as its weakest link. And watching how Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport handles its air security and screening during the overnight hours, one can only say that security is asleep at the switch.

Security checkpoints are just part of travel these days. They're supposed to keep us safe, so we use them - but not all of us and not all the time.

We've discovered a 4.5 hour time frame each night when virtually anything can be brought into the secure side of Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. There's no metal detector, no X-ray machine, and it's apparently not a problem.

Afraid to show her face, one long time Sky Harbor employee talks about the security most people don't see.

Lisa Fletcher: "You're telling me Sky Harbor's not safe?"

Employee: "I'm telling you Sky Harbor's not safe and hasn't been for a long time."

It's what we discovered in the middle of the night - TSA agents going away, and security guards taking over. It's 4.5 hours - every night - when an employee badge becomes an all-access pass.

Night after night, our hidden cameras captured what security experts tell us is a disaster waiting to happen.

The X-ray machines were off, the metal detectors were closed, and bags with unknown contents were carried to the secure side of the airport where the planes are.

We watched as a security guard let people with purses, coolers and suitcases
walk right through - bags unchecked.

When you have passengers and other individuals who are able to gain access to the secured areas beyond the inactive x-ray scanners and screening section without inspection of baggage, one wonders how exactly can this be called security?

What makes it all the more galling is that the TSA supposedly has signed off on this arrangement despite TSA regulations that require baggage checks at airports 24/7/365.

How many other airports around the country have substandard baggage checks during the overnight hours and does anyone at the TSA actually care? If someone is able to get into the system, they're able to fly around the country and the world and no one would be any the wiser that someone was able to bring contraband or worse aboard.

UPDATE:
It's those kinds of things that keeps VP Cheney up all night, and Newsweek points to a new biography of the Vice President and spins some of this worry as a negative - the gloomy demeanor of the man. The VP has long worried about additional terrorist attacks and continuity of government should an attack decapitate the chain of command, and it is actually good to see that someone was taking an interest in such a dire and unspoken concern.

Yet, the Newsweek piece is also informative in that the intel that was coming into the WH was so much garbage. There was no way to process and weed out reports:

Most Americans have not quite grasped how imminent and overwhelming the danger seemed to be, at least to those reading the incoming intelligence. Under pressure to produce something—anything—about terrorist planning, the CIA and FBI flooded the White House with raw intelligence, much of it dubious or just wrong, but terrifying in its totality. At one point, security officials believed that the home belonging to Elizabeth Cheney, the veep's daughter, had been hit by an anthrax attack. Elizabeth had to call her nanny to get her to take the kids to "the mall," as she put it—so they could be tested for exposure.

In a revealing interview, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (at the time Bush's national-security adviser), told Hayes, "[Cheney] read every intelligence report. I mean every intelligence report no matter how minor. And I was feeling kind of driven crazy by not knowing how to—at that time we didn't really have a good system for sorting what was reliable and what wasn't. I mean, we were just getting raw reporting of everything that was coming in, you know. So I remember thinking that he had an extraordinary memory ... for all of these things."

How exactly could anyone make a rational decision when the intel on which they had to act was faulty, inaccurate, and contradictory. Hindsight may prove the intel to be faulty, but when one looks at the volumn of reports, one had to err on the side of caution and do what was best for the nation's national security. It's an ongoing problem, and building in new layers of bureaucracy do little to improve intel gathering and analysis.

UPDATE:
The TSA has taken action as a result of being embarrassed by the major failings to screen passengers and personnel 24/7 at Sky Harbor.

As a result of an ABC15 Investigation, Transportation Security Administration administrator Kip Hawley has determined Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport is violating TSA policy which requires all workers to be screened at security checkpoints.

The TSA has reportedly placed the Federal Security Director at Sky Harbor on administrative leave.

The TSA also says it will resume 24-hour screening tonight at all airport security checkpoints.

A follow up question should be whether other airports engaged in similar behavior. I suspect it was not alone.