Prepared Statement of Administrator Kip Hawley
Assistant Secretary of the Transportation Security Administration
Before the U.S. House of Representatives
Committee on Homeland Security
Subcommittee on Transportation Security and Infrastructure Protection
April 19, 2007
Good morning Madam Chairwoman, Mr. Lungren, and Members of the Committee.
Thank you for this opportunity to discuss security at America’s airports as you prepare to mark-up legislation in this area.
While we often look at aviation security one slice at a time,
- what do we do for employee screening, for air cargo,
- for passenger checkpoint, for checked bags, for watchlists,
- for perimeter, etc.
It is critical that we keep in mind that to terrorists, we are one target, and they don’t care which particular place they attack.
We need balance and flexibility in our all of our security measures.
If we jump from concern to concern mandating measures for each one, we may tie up critical resources and do nothing more than make it easy for a terrorist to attack somewhere else.
If an attack is successful, it does us no good to say that we were impenetrable at a different spot.
I will outline for you this morning TSA’s plan for effective screening of airport employees. It is, in my view, the most effective security for this environment.
Passenger screening uses a different model than airport employee screening and it makes common sense that we use a different approach.
Passengers come to the airport and not much is known about them. We move them through security and hold them in a sterile area before they board the plane.
It is completely different with airport workers. We know a lot about them and they are well-known to other workers.
When they come to work, they are gaining access to the equivalent of a small city which already contains more than enough raw materials to commit a terrorist act. Therefore, keeping track of people and what they’re doing is a better approach to security.
Therefore, the best security for that environment is to insure that only the right people get in to that area and that hostile intent or suspicious behavior is identified quickly.
It doesn’t make sense to dig in security resources looking in lunch pails when the real vulnerability is what happens inside.
Magnetometers cannot detect suspicious behavior.
In fact, installing fixed checkpoints makes the job easier for terrorists.
Although it may be comforting for us to see employees in line for screening, a checkpoint provides an unchanging, predictable barrier that is always there, every day. And the terrorist can spend all the time he needs to find ways around, over, or through it.
For this reason, we must use many layers of security—each nimble, unpredictable, and dynamic.
Just as we are pushing the perimeter of security beyond the checkpoint for passengers—with the use of behavior recognition, document checkers, canine teams—we are using the same strategy when it comes to employee screening.
This leads me to the plan I am here to discuss.
With our airport partners, we have agreed to create a practical, workable, solution to employee screening.
It is an evolution of what we do today and adds real, risk-based security.
TSA already has a layered security plan in place for the nation’s airport workers. Now building on top of that, we will add this six point security plan as follows:
- Behavior observation: The population of highly skilled officers will grow beyond TSA to include airport employees trained to recognize hostile intent and suspicious behavior.
- Employee training: We will go beyond what we already do and raise awareness of suspicious behavior.
- Targeted physical inspection: We will now add airport-employed roving patrols to TSA’s random, unpredictable employee-screening.
- Biometric access control: We will add security by knowing who is where in the airport environment.
- Certified employees: We will create a new level of employee risk assessment that will allow established low-risk employees easier mobility to do their jobs.
- Technology deployment: Security technology will continue to be developed and deployed for specific use in the airport environment.
Better overall security is achieved if personnel are not tied down at checkpoints checking and re-checking people that work in the airport every day.
We want our security resources on the move so that terrorists cannot plan an attack knowing what defenses they will face.
I appreciate the Committee’s interest in working with us on a pilot approach to further explore the options, and we will be good partners in that effort.
We will not, however, need to wait to implement what I have just outlined. We have begun work to start some of these measures in the near future.
Thank you and I would be happy to answer your questions.
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