Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
The more we discover about the TSA, the more we have to worry about.
On the heels of Transportation Security Administration workers flunking a security test at airport checkpoints, the results of a new audit show that — while the agency keeps a robust system for screening commercial airport workers — it still failed to flag 73 airport workers “linked to terrorism.”
Apparently, TSA does not have access to all the terror watchlist information it needs to make those judgments. “The TSA did not identify these individuals through its vetting operations because it is not authorized to receive all terrorism-related categories under current interagency watch-listing policy,” the June 4 Inspector General report stated.
According to TSA data, the people in question were working for major airlines, airport venders and other employers. The agency acknowledged that individuals in these categories “represented a potential transportation security threat,” according to the report.
It gets worse. Apparently these are only the details that were released to the public.
In an op-ed piece published Monday, Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., wrote that last week’s full report should be made available to the public. Parts of it had been redacted.
“The publicly available facts are disturbing, but the classified details are even worse,” he wrote in USA Today. “Millions of families will soon fly to summer vacations, but if moms knew what members of Congress have learned behind closed doors, they would march on Washington demanding an urgent, top-to-bottom reevaluation of airport security.”
When bureaucracies grow too large, details fall through the cracks. The stakes are too high for the TSA to become bloated and complacent.
