TSA decides to suspend installation of trace detection portals

Gone with the wind: In a striking blow to an important emerging techonology, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has decided to suspend installation of General Electric and Smiths Detection’s trace detection portals, more popularly known as puffers. Designed by Sandia National Laboratories, the machines were beset by problems caused by dirty air. Aware of reliability issues, TSA labs began in 2001 to reconfigure the $160,000 machines to withstand constant use, and widespread roll-out was already delayed as the machines were being tested in thirty-four airports nationwide. With criticism already mounting that the machines cannot detect liquid explosives, this is a bad turn indeed.

The news comes among growing concern about the federal goverment’s ability to turn laboratory advances into airport successes, despite having spent $450 million on the effort since 9/11. The New York Times lists a number of problems:

[MICHAEL: BULLET POINTS BELOW

1. TSA originally planned to install document scanners that could detect traces of explosives on paper. After years of testing, the agency now believes it wiser to test passengers’ hands. Yet it has no plan to implement such a program.

2. After awarding a large grant to increase the speed of baggage explosive detection systems, and finding the completed work satisfactory, TSA has not made the neccesary software upgrades.

3. In 2003 TSA gave Bedford, Massachusetts-based Reveal Imaging Technologies a $2.4 million grant to develop a smaller, cheaper explosives-detection machine that could screen checked bags at the ticket counter. It then spent $3.3 million to buy eight of them, but in testing did not incorporate them into the neccesary security network, leading one congressman to call the episode “an absolute fiasco, a farce.”

[END BULLETS]

Differences in priorities between TSA and the Science and Technology Division (S&T) of DHS is a major problem, the Times reports. TSA, responding to political pressure to stop another attack, looks for quick fixes to known problems — detecting knives, guns, and plastic explosives. This conflicts with S&T’s interest in long-term, revolutionary approaches that take into account unknown threats and build it flexibility for what Donald Rumsfeld calls the “unknown unknowns.”

“You have to have a long-term strategy and a short- to medium-term strategy,” said Stephen J. McHale, the former TSA deputy administrator. “What we have been doing is shifting resources back and forth between those two goals. The result of that is we are not making the best progress in either one.”

TSA seems to be hearing the criticism. Michael Jackson, deputy secretary of homeland security, “believes the agency should hire contractors to help test new equipment which could reduce the time it takes to certify that a device works,” the Times reported. He also suggested “the department should consider buying security equipment from manufacturers as a service, like leasing a car instead of buying it, which would allow the government to upgrade technology more quickly as newer products come out.”

-read more in this New York Times report