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Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, how the TSA has managed to make flying more of a hassle and, somehow, not much safer.
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Basu, Narrating: Let's go back to 2017. A man in his late-30s goes to the airport in Detroit to fly home to Toronto.
Darryl Campbell: So, he's tall, brown skin, South Asian descent, facial hair, and he's wearing a turban.
Basu, Narrating: He passes security without any issue; no metal detectors or other alarm bells are set off. But then, on the other side of the check point, he's stopped by two TSA officers.
Campbell: And say, look we're not gonna let you get on your airplane until you go through additional screening. So, you need to come back with us, get a pat down in a private room, take off your turban.
Basu, Narrating: The man is Sikh, and asking him to remove his turban is against TSA protocol. It's considered a violation of a Sikh person's religion. So, the man pushes back and says he will not remove his turban.
Campbell: They go back and forth, he refuses, they threaten to escalate. And then it's not until this guy produces a passport that says he's not just some random person, but he's actually a Canadian government minister named Navdeep Bains, and that he's officially recognized by the U.S. government as not a threat. And that's the point that they back off. Now, most of us don't have the backing of one of our closest allies, we don't have diplomatic passports. I mean, what are you gonna do in that situation? You're just gonna submit and then let them do it and maybe complain about it afterwards.
Basu, Narrating: The person you're hearing tell us this story is Darryl Campbell. He recently wrote a piece for "The Verge" called "The Humiliating History of the TSA."
It's been more than two decades since the Transportation Security Administration, the TSA, was established in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. And the agency's public-facing mission is to stop the next 9/11. But these days, most terror plots are stopped long before they get to the airport. And the story of the Canadian minister represents what most people think of when it comes to airport security today — a system that hassles, aggravates and, in some cases, demoralizes the very people it's supposed to be protecting.
Campbell: There's a real difference between the illusion of security that the TSA creates and spends a lot of money to create and the reality of how we can actually make ourselves better prepared to meet terrorist threats.
Basu, Narrating: Darryl and I started our conversation by talking about a time before the TSA; this is the 1960s and early '70s. Airport security was very limited. And get this: during this decade, American airliners were getting hijacked, on average, about once a month.
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Campbell: So, if you said the word "hijacker" to someone in let's say 1965, the image that they would get is either D. B. Cooper or essentially a political protestor. So, hijackings were really not that threatening. They weren't there to crash airplanes into buildings. They weren't even there to inflict casualties. Most of the time, what happened was that someone hijacked an airplane just to make a political statement or, because this was the height of the Cold War, to get political asylum in Cuba. So, functionally speaking for the airlines, what would happen is a hijacker would get in there, tell the cockpit, "Fly this plane to Havana," and the passengers would get a tropical weekend and then they'd get picked up on Monday. The airplane would be fine, the pilots would be fine, and only one person in that entire span was killed and no aircraft were harmed. In fact, it was such a common occurrence that, if you remember the old "Monty Python" TV show, they even did a skit about it.
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Hijacker: Will you fly this plane to Luton please?
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Pilot: Well, this is a scheduled flight to Cuba.
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Hijacker: I know, I know. I want you to fly this plane to Luton, please.
Pilot: Right. Well, I better turn the plane around then. Stand by Emergency Systems.
Hijacker: Look, I don't wanna cause any trouble.
Pilot: No, no. We'll manage. We'll manage.
[END MONTY PYTHON'S FLYING CIRCUS ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Campbell: So, that's how non-threatening it was. But around 1972 and especially after the Munich Olympics, the Nixon administration took a lot more seriously the threat of political hijackings and really instituted this kind of first iteration of airport security, where we have metal detectors and essentially trying to stop people with guns from getting on board.
Basu: Yeah. Yeah. So, tell us a little bit more about what airport security was starting to shape up to be, 1972 onward.
Campbell: So, the idea was that it would be fairly unobtrusive and kind of similar to things that people experience normally. So, you'd get the metal detectors, and you'd have to put your bags and carry-ons through a scanner just to check for explosives or weapons, but pretty non-intrusive and pretty quick. So, not really like what we have today, where it can take you hours and hours to get through TSA.
Basu: And was it effective? I kinda hesitate to ask that question. But effective in the sense of did it meaningfully stop dangerous things from happening on airplanes?
Campbell: For the most part, it was good at its very localized job of finding guns and that kind of thing. We know, for example, that every so often the FAA would test these screeners, send people with fake weapons through and see if they actually got detected and the success rate there was pretty high. It was about 80%. In fact, we have a comparable statistic from today's TSA where they have similar challenge teams coming in, trying to essentially do what a terrorist might do and smuggle weapons in, and their success rate is a shockingly low five to 10%.
Basu: Oh, wow. That's significantly low. Wow.
Campbell: Yeah, it is a lot lower. It seems like the old regime was a little bit better at actually catching what it said it was going to catch.
Basu: What do we know about why the modern TSA system is not catching so many of these test instances?
Campbell: There is so much process around the airport security model today that there's a lot of different ways that it can break. So, in the past it was metal detector, explosive scanner, X-ray scanner, and that was it. But now you've got the shoes and the liquids and the body scanner. And there are so many other ways that people can exploit these things that are kind of ostensibly designed to make it safer, but in reality, add a lot more complexity to the whole process.
Basu: I think a lot of people know, or at the very least they might remember, that the TSA, as we know it, was really created after 9/11. I thought it might be helpful actually to talk about what happened and what went wrong on that day. Can you tell us more about the hijackers and how they were able to get through security and carry out the attacks?
Campbell: Well, if you remember, the old version of airport security was designed to detect bombs, large knives and really individuals. And what the 9/11 hijackers exploited wasn't so much a process gap or a technology gap but kind of a mentality gap, if you like. That there was really just no idea that people could spend years learning how to fly airplanes, organizing themselves into groups, and then, on mass, hijacking three or four airplanes at a time. So, nothing was really designed to stop that kind of organization. And like I said, pilots were trained to actually let hijackers into the cockpit and cooperate with them. So, that I think was the major failure. Obviously, you can say that maybe a more stringent security process would've caught box cutters. But again, that's another mentality shift that people didn't think that box cutters would be used to hijack airplanes or mace could be used to hijack airplanes, but it did. And so, the reason that the TSA, in my reporting and in discussions with security experts, is so ineffective is because it's just so singularly organized around a threat that is kind of like the Trojan Horse. Everybody knows about it, it was so successful, and now, for the rest of history, everybody's going to be on the lookout for that kind of thing. And there's really diminishing returns if you layer on evermore security, just oriented around that.
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Basu, Narrating: When the TSA was first created in those weeks after 9/11, there was a hiring frenzy for this new Trojan-Horse-seeking agency, about 40,000 new TSOs, Transportation Security Officers, in a matter of months. But there wasn't a ton of thought put into what these new hires were actually going to do on the job.
Campbell: I spoke with a TSO who is named Scott Becker and he worked at Chicago O'Hare from 2002 until 2015. And he said that among the many clever acronyms that people called them, people would always say that TSA stood for "thousands standing around" because for the most part, they knew they had to do something, but there wasn't really strong guidance from the top.
Basu, Narrating: That eventually changed. There are now so many defined roles for TSOs, from the person who checks your passport out to the one who tells you to take off your shoes. But morale remains a problem. TSOs have the lowest job satisfaction of any Federal agency. For every four officers hired, three quit. And close to 20% of new hires leave within the first six months.
Campbell: They know that they're second-class government employees, and I think that can be a real challenge for some of them.
Plus, they deal with constant harassment from passengers.
Campbell: This was a common theme from all of the TSOs that I interviewed, that they get called names, that they get confrontational. And recently in the last couple years, I mean, people have actually gotten physically violent with TSOs that, you know, they're attacking them with either their fists, with a machete, with bear spray.
All of this, Darryl says, leads to a super burned-out workforce.
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Campbell: If you think about it, TSOs, even though they are law enforcement officers, it's really unlike any other position in that they're not allowed to use their own discretion, to use their own judgment. There's really no wiggle room. They're really just cogs in a machine, if you like. And if they don't do that, then they could get fired. For the first two years that you work at TSA as a frontline security officer, you're basically on probation. So, anything you do can get you fired. If someone decides that you haven't followed a process, if someone doesn't like you, they can even do that. There's really no arbitration process. You can get fired without cause for any kind of deviance.
Basu: Right. So, it's a pretty stressful first two years for most new TSO, right?
Campbell: Oh yeah, exactly. And then, you know in the back of your head that there's webcams, there's these challenge teams that might be coming in, there's supervisors in plain clothes, checking the checkpoint; so, there's the obvious part of surveillance. And then in exchange for that, you are one of the lowest paid positions in the entire federal workforce. Standard salary for TSO starts at around $35,000 a year. And some people … After that two-year probationary period is up, everybody gets a raise, and then for some people that's just gonna be the last raise that they see for the rest of their career. You know, there's someone in Dallas here where I am that said that they got that 15% bump and then nothing, and they'd been at the agency for almost two decades.
Basu, Narrating: Then there's the screening process. For my whole adult life, it's been a mystery to me how it works. I'm a South Asian and Middle Eastern American citizen; I get pulled aside for quote-unquote "random checks" nearly every time I fly. And when I strike up conversations with other people in these random lines, we always say the same thing: it sure doesn't feel random to us. So, I asked Darryl, what's the deal here? How does TSA screening protocol actually work?
Campbell: So, this is a classic example of what the TSA says versus what it does. On paper, the TSA is not supposed to do anything unlawful, any kind of profiling, anything that would treat an entire class of people a different way, just for the sake that they belong to a specific ethnic group or they look a certain way. In practice, we know that that's different. So, a government accountability office survey found that in a two-year period, there were almost a thousand instances of probable racial discrimination caused by TSOs. And we know that the TSA itself collects statistics on the number of complaints it gets, and they range in the hundreds of every year. But even though we have hundreds of instances on record, the actual number is probably a lot more.
Basu: I think that's what's so troubling about it, right? All the uncaptured instances. Has there been any formal effort to catalogue these instances in a way that would be, you know, a meaningful catalyst for change?
Campbell: It's pretty piecemeal. The government accountability office is probably the most consistent one, and they release a report every couple of years, specifically on TSA. But we don't see anything happening other than the TSA responding in letter form and promising to do better, but also saying that we're not doing anything illegal and everything we do is done in the name of security.
Basu: You also discuss and describe in pretty vivid detail a lot of gender discrimination that happens at TSA. One person that you spoke with, a trans woman, says that whenever she flies, she's pretty much guaranteed to get a pat down from the TSA. So what seems to go wrong there?
Campbell: So, this is an example of the TSA deploying technology that's really kind of half baked. So, we all know the body scanners, the ones where you stand up and you put your hands out and it kind of spins around and does its thing. I didn't know this, but when you go through, the TSO actually has to press a button that says, we're gonna scan you either as a male or a female. And the reason why is because if it didn't have that input, everybody would get scanned and everybody would have to go through a pat down because these machines just aren't really calibrated to do a good job of capturing the difference between let's say hair and a bomb, which is not very … it doesn't inspire confidence. Let's put it that way.
Basu: Hmm. So, what are some of the misconceptions that are built into that algorithm that make assumptions?
Campbell: Yeah. So, this is where I spoke to one of the world's leading experts on what they call automated gender recognition. Their name is Os Keys and they're a researcher in computer science at the University of Washington. And what Os said is essentially if you hit the female button, what it's telling the machine is that, okay, ignore long hair, ignore a bra underwire, but don't expect anything, any fleshy protrusions around the groin area. And then vice versa for males. So, it kind of encodes this idea of gender based on Western norms, based on sort of biological differences that may not reflect what people actually experience or what people choose to present themselves as. And this is where Victoria runs into problems because she says that if she gets scanned as a female, then her groin sets it off. If she gets scanned as a male, then her chest sets it off and her hair sets it off. So, it's really a no-win situation. And then when you go through and actually get a pat down, I mean, this is not a light frisking, this is an 18-step process. The TSO has to put their hands inside the waistband of your pants or skirt. They have to press on your chest, on your buttocks, on your thighs, on your groin. It's really unpleasant. And it takes a lot of time. So, you can imagine just this entire category of people that's subjected to a pat down, not because they're a threat, not because they have any concerning behavior, but just because the machines are not very good. And that happens every single time and it makes people not wanna fly and not able to exercise their freedom of movement around the country.
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Basu, Narrating: Darryl told us a story that illustrates how the current system harms both passengers and TSOs. One day on the job, an officer named Jai Cooper was scanning boarding passes and IDs when she heard crying coming from the back of the line. A family approached with a relative in a wheelchair; she was hunched over and unresponsive. Cooper learned that she had died sometime after checking in.
Campbell: That created this weird gray area because as long as they had a ticket in hand, but because they hadn't been to a doctor to issue a death certificate, as far as the airline was concerned from a legal point of view, they felt like they were still obligated to carry that person to their final destination.
Basu, Narrating: Cooper knew that she had to follow the protocol or risk losing her job.
Campbell: She was in the uncomfortable position of obligating one of her colleagues to essentially check this corpse for explosives, weapons, and it's a fairly intensive process. So, it was a something that she had to obligate someone to do that was pretty traumatic.
Basu, Narrating: Eventually, Cooper quit. She said she just couldn't take working in that environment anymore.
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Campbell: Even though you have this situation that's really uncomfortable for everyone - the family knows it, the TSO, Jai Cooper knew it - she still had to do her job exactly the way she was told or else there would be severe consequences for her all the way up to firing. So, that humanity, her kind of innate empathy with the family, was directly in conflict with what her job told her to do. And I think that was the central tension of that particular story that I really found compelling. In a lot of ways, there really is no bad guy here except the process. And you feel for the family and you feel for both the TSO, and I thought that was really important.
Basu: Let's come back to what this is all supposed to be about, which is safety. [LAUGHS] I feel like the reason that people, mostly begrudgingly, but just at all, are willing to put up with this is supposedly it's making us safer, but you argue in this piece that that's not really true. So, tell us, what does the TSA do to actively prevent acts of terrorism today?
Campbell: Every new process, every new technology that gets thrown into the mix adds a cost, whether that's in terms of people's time, in terms of budget money, in terms of people's civil liberties and their trust in government. And I think there's really not enough attention paid to the practicalities of what's going on in the security process. There's actually a really clever way that a professor named Mark Stewart tried to really square the circle. So, he said, okay, we don't necessarily know what the TSA stops, they may not be telling us, but let's take them at their word and let's assume that they stop an attack on the U.S. that causes 9/11-level casualties about once a decade and that they're both a hundred percent responsible and a hundred percent effective at stopping that risk. So, that allows him to do something which the government calls "cost per life saved," but it's really just kind of a fancy calculation of how much money we spend on an intervention versus how much safety it actually does. And this allows us to compare really disparate things. So, for example, mandatory seat belt laws cost about $140 per life saved. A night in the ER costs about a million dollars per life saved. And generally speaking, the government's threshold is about $10 million per life saved is the level that they'll kind of, and anything under that, they'll be happy to fund. So, if you take the TSA in this best possible scenario, even then, the cost per life saved is $15 million. And if you take more realistic assessments of both the level of threat and the TSA's effectiveness, then that number becomes $667 million per life saved. So, almost 70 times what the government should theoretically be willing to pay. And that comes with a real consequence because the TSA, you know, we've spent $140 billion since 9/11 on budgeting for the TSA. In fact, the TSA's budget is twice what the FBI spends on counterterrorism and counterintelligence, but what do we have to show for it?
Basu: So, just to be clear about what the TSA is doing today, what would you say is its literal functionality? It might talk about counterterrorism, but literally on the ground, what does the TSA do? What is it responsible for, and does it create safety in any way?
Campbell: So, it does create safety in lots of ways that they don't really kind of trumpet because it takes away from their focus on 9/11. But for example, they stop human trafficking, they keep people from taking loaded weapons onto airplanes. You know, I live in Texas where that's a pretty common occurrence or at least it would be without the TSA. And people don't necessarily understand that if a gun were to go off in the middle of a flight, not only would it be terrifying for everybody, but it could potentially cause the airplane to lose its structural integrity. So, I'm glad they do that. They catch people who are carrying contraband items, carrying drugs. It's not really in their purview to actually make an arrest on that, but they're able to refer those to airport police or the FBI or other partner agencies. So, in lots of these little ways that I think are unheralded, they do keep us safe. It's just that they're funded and they're positioned in PR as the 9/11 stoppers, and I think that reflects their oversized budget compared to other more effective agencies.
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Basu, Narrating: Air travel is a lot of safer from threats of terrorism than it was 20 years ago, but not necessarily because of the TSA.
Campbell: The things that keep us safe in the air today are the locks and reinforced cockpit doors and the fact that flight crews are no longer trained to cooperate with hijackers and to let them into the cockpit. But they're trained to just say, if there's a problem in the back of the cabin, get the plane on the ground, don't let anybody in.
Basu, Narrating: Passengers are also more prepared, in extreme cases, to be responsible for their own safety.
Campbell: This is what happened with the underwear bomber in 2006. It's what happened with the shoe bomber in 2001. It wasn't TSA that stopped them, it was just individual passengers who are just keeping an eye out on the airplane.
Basu, Narrating: Darryl says our security is primarily dependent not on the TSA, but on partner intelligence agencies: on the military, the CIA, the FBI.
Campbell: And they're pretty effective at it. The think tank "RAND" said that something like two-thirds of all terrorist plots are actually disrupted in the planning stage before they can even think about operationalizing anything.
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Basu, Narrating: So, why not just do away with the TSA, or at least substantially reform it? Darryl says, it's politically untouchable.
Campbell: No politician wants to be seen as soft on security. And if they propose a reform and then heaven forbid something happens, well, you can guess who's gonna get voted out during the next election. So…
Basu: Right. Right.
Campbell: It creates a political vulnerability that I think makes it very difficult to affect any kind of change. And that's a shame because, as we know, the kinds of threats that we face today are less like Osama bin Laden and more like Timothy McVeigh. I mean, we've seen these sort of quote-unquote "lone-wolf shooters" in military bases, in nightclubs, even in airports, attack people and cause real damage. And that's a threat that the TSA is totally unprepared for.
Basu: It sounds like what I hear you saying is that the TSA is an old solution to the problem, but modern-day terrorism just looks very different and requires a different set of solutions. Is that right?
Campbell: I think that's pretty accurate. I think there's a real difference between the illusion of security that the TSA creates, and spends a lot of money to create, and the reality of how we can actually make ourselves better prepared to meet terrorist threats. I think there really needs to be a more agile system, more feedback loops, just more recognition that the main thread is not post-security anymore, but it's actually involving the whole airport and involving people who get radicalized online and aren't necessarily trying to bring down a whole airplane, but just trying to create casualties in whatever way they can. So, we have evidence that the threat has changed so much. Why hasn't the TSA?
Basu: What would a better system look like? What would it mean to improve the experience of air travel in a way that also keeps us safe?
Campbell: I think we would have to take a really hard look at the level of time that gets wasted versus the level of additional security. And I think there's pretty clear instances of diminishing returns on every new policy that comes in. One easy one is I think just rethinking the whole process of body scanners. I think there are more effective and fairer ways to really make it possible to detect explosives and guns in ways that don't require these kind of nonfunctional scanners. I think that one would be a really good case for bringing dogs in who can sniff gun oil and explosive residue and so on. In a way that's both not as obtrusive, a lot faster and a lot fairer in terms of not excluding trans people or people who can't stand up in the scanner and relegating them to a pat down every time. I think more behavioral-based security would be good. So, I'll give you an example here. So, we've talked about here in the U.S. where it's a lot more profile based, where people are subjected to additional screening based on the way they look or the way their name sounds. A couple of years ago, my wife and I were flying through Rome, and we were having an argument about who's gonna take the heavy bag as a carry-on. And then eventually, someone came up to us and started chatting with us and asking, "Okay, where are you going? Can I see your ticket? Blah, blah, blah." And it wasn't until they went away that I said, "Oh, I think I just got screened extra," which makes sense. It was a potentially suspicious behavior. But it didn't feel like I was being taken by the collar and shunted into a room and given a pat down. It was obtrusive; it did its job. And I think it does make everybody safer, but it's done by a professional who has discretion, who's trained to make the experience as painless as possible, and who I think is probably doing a better job of focusing on the right threats rather than focusing everything on everyone and hoping that they kind of catch one just by sort of the law of numbers.
Basu: You mentioned earlier that some people refer to 9/11 as our Pearl Harbor of this time, but you argue that it might make more sense to call it our Trojan Horse. So, what do you mean by that? And what's the lesson there?
Campbell: So, the Trojan Horse example is just a strategy that was so successful, so devastating and so infamous that, essentially, it's never gonna happen again in history. And the Trojan Horse itself never really kind of happened again either. And I think 9/11 was a one and done kind of thing. People know now that they'll have to fight back if terrorists ever tried to hijack an airplane using the same tactics. Pilots know that they're not gonna comply with terrorists anymore. And so, I think focusing so relentlessly on that, in an age when you only have limited time and budget and resources, really ignores the ways that the threat of terror and the threat of anything to aviation safety has really changed and has become more, I don't know, broad based. So, when people are thinking about how to inflict damage on the air travel system, it's not just onboard airplanes anymore, but it's at the security checkpoint or in the parking lot outside. And I think not recognizing that and not really building your processes in a way that really takes into account the security threat that exists today versus the one that existed 20 years ago really does a lot of disservice to both the public's confidence in TSA and its effectiveness at actually doing its job of keeping us safe.
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Basu: Darryl, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.
Campbell: Of course. Thank you for having me on.
Basu, Narrating: You can read Darryl's article for "The Verge" on Apple News. You can find a link on our show notes page.
Since we aired this interview, the TSA reached out to us with a comment. Regarding worker morale, TSA told us, they agree that TSOs are quote, "underpaid, overworked and treated poorly for the essential task they perform." They said President Biden is working to provide pay equity for the TSA workforce and that it's officially part of the President's budget request to Congress. They also said they have new standards for screening and updated procedures that no longer require TSOs to identify a passenger's gender when being screened.
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