Although the Transportation Security Administration has been enhancing its aviation measures this year, agency head John S. Pistole said Monday that it has no plans to get into one of the worst-case screening scenarios: cavity checks.
“We’re not getting into the business of doing body cavity [searches],” he said. “That’s not where we are.”
While security experts have talked for years about the possibility of terrorists attacking U.S. airliners by concealing explosives in their bodies to avoid detection, Pistole said coming up with a specific countermeasure for the scenario — instituting manual checks or coming up with a technological solution — does not seem necessary. Due to the nature of the improvised explosive devices terrorists are known to use, he said, whole body image scanners and other current technology would be able to detect them.
“Even if it is a body cavity, you still need some sort of external device,” he said.
The external device in question would be a trigger or activator for the explosives, he said, using the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian born man accused of trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit on Christmas Day. Abdulmutallab allegedly had a packet containing the explosive PETN — the same compound used in the October parcel bomb incident — and a modified syringe holding a liquid acid that, when released onto the PETN, would have caused it to explode.
While a terrorist could hide explosives in a body cavity, Pistole said, the activating device would still have to be hidden outside of the body.
“That’s what the Advanced Imaging Technology machine can pick up,” he said.
Pistole also challenged media reports regarding the use of explosives hidden inside of terrorists, particularly a 2009 account of a terrorist who reportedly tried to kill a counterterrorism official in Saudi Arabia by having fellow attackers use a cell phone to detonate a bomb he smuggled in through a body cavity, similar to methods drug “mules” use to conceal contraband.
He said the forensics in the case were not conclusive, though.
“There’s a stronger indication in findings that it was actually an Abdulmutallab-type” of bomb concealed in the underwear strapped to the upper thigh,” Pistole said.
Some security experts, however, disagree on the severity of the cavity threat.
“Ironically, even these more intrusive pat-downs won’t stop a determined and moderately skilled terrorist,” said Chris Battle, a former director of public affairs at Immigration and Customs Enforcement who manages homeland security issues for the Adfero Group, a public relations firm. These guys aren’t afraid to use body cavities.”
Pistole also addressed TSA’s much-maligned new “enhanced pat-down” policy, which required a transportation security officer to personally search anyone who refused to go through a whole-body imaging machine, including checking sensitive areas of the body. The plan had been in the works since the Abdulmutallab case was discovered, Pistole said, but he made the decision to implement it after the parcel bomb plot, and seeing evidence that terrorists are still determined to smuggle improvised explosive devices aboard aircraft.
“The idea is to be the least invasive we can and yet to accomplish the goal that everybody wants — to know that you’ve been screened and I’ve been screened and everyone on that flight has been screened,” he said. “There are only so many ways we can accomplish that.”
And, while he acknowledged that TSA made a conscious decision to not ease Americans into the policy through an advance public relations campaign, he said the agency will maintain the policy unless it can find an easier method that produces valid security results.
“I see flying as a privilege that is a public safety issue, and the government has a role in providing for the public safety and we need to do everything we can in partnership with the traveling public to inform them about what their options are,” he said, adding that those options include going through a pat-down rather than a whole-body scanner.
He said the agency is very interested in developing “automated target identification,” a software solution that would allow whole-body scanners to automatically find threats or anomalies, instead of requiring TSA staff to read and interpret images they generate.
While the technology is being tested internationally, so far it has produced a large number of false positives, Pistole said. And, he said, a false positive requires a pat-down.
-- Rob Margetta, CQ Staff
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