50 Cleared for Takeoff

James Loy, head of the Transportation Security Administration, says that he can safeguard the airlines and their passengers, now that Congress has said he can unpack.

CAPS 2 has to incorporate the ability to do those kinds of things and down the road add applications that might enhance our ability to do more thoughtful things. For example, there's some excellent software that we're looking at that is about name identification. Mohammed has, for example, many interpretations of spelling around the world. A software program could help us determine whether or not the right Mohammed is the guy standing in front of us. And that all has to be focused on a system that enables an almost instant turnaround query so that even a walk-up person buying a ticket at the terminal can be queried against the CAPS system.Can you prevent someone from getting on a plane who hasn't actually broken the law?I have to be careful here because this is classified stuff, but it's a matter of, what are the deliverable outcomes and what's the labeling process? If you worry about profiling up front, you worry about labeling. There's a category of folks who deserve more scrutiny. If we find someone, when we check against the FBI database, who's wanted for murder in 12 states, we ought to keep him from boarding the aircraft. The point is that CAPS 2 will be a quantum level better in security and customer service. If we have it in place, and we re-sequence the events that actually occurred at an airport, we can probably get rid of gate screeningthe secondary screening that occurs just before you board the aircraft. My goal as part of the customer service hassle-factor reduction would be to eliminate gate screening.What do you think of news reports from time to time where someone walks through a security gate with nonapproved items?I'm troubled when journalists or whoever else break the law consciously to test the system. That in and of itself is a bother to me. The inspector general's office has a very robust self-testing system that is designed to do the same thing in an environment in which we can take the appropriate action. Which is to say, if we get something through, we want to go back with remedial training instantly for the screener or the screener's supervisor, or maybe even find that the performance is such that termination is the right answer. You might remember a case a while back where a woman successfully got a .357 Magnum through the checkpoint process in Atlanta, carried it all the way to Philadelphia, left the sanitized area, came back through the checkpoint and was found there. When we tracked that one back in Atlantait was not a TSA employee, by the waywe isolated the screener, who had done exactly what she was supposed to do. She didn't understand what she saw on the screen and called her supervisor. The supervisor said, "I see what you mean." He hand-checked the bag and didn't find the weapon, and off it went on the airplane. The screener is still working; the supervisor is not. The notion there is accountability.