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TSA's Risk-based Approach to Security

George Naccara is betting that the lift of his risk-based reforms will overcome the drag of politics and bureaucracy. And the test bed for these innovations is Boston's Logan Airport

So, let's say Logan manages to keep myriad stakeholders together, and then manages to minimize publicly embarrassing incidents at checkpoints and improve its staffing problems, and then manages to keep the behavioral profiling program intact despite challenges along the way. Naccara's vision of a reworked TSA still faces another challengemaybe its biggest of all: metrics.

One of the Coast Guard's many jobs is fisheries enforcementmaking sure fisherman aren't fishing in restricted waters. For decades, Congress gauged the success of fisheries enforcement by one metric above all others: boat boardings. Like meter maids giving out tickets, the more boats the Coast Guard boarded in or near restricted waters, the better the job it was doing. Then came GPS technology, and the Coast Guard didn't need to board so many boatsofficers could see where boats were going from their own vessels. Boardings dropped significantly. Russ Webster, who like Naccara was a Coastie, remembers that when it came time to review the Coast Guard budget, the first question Congress asked was, "Hey, what happened to fisheries enforcement?"

Nothing had, of course, but the Coast Guard was a prisoner of its "metric of success," as Webster calls it. When that metric declined sharply, enforcement was assumed to have declined sharply too. The same is about to happen to TSA with the sharp-objects and checkpoint-throughput metrics.

"It's unfortunate, but our two metrics are how many knives did we take away and what's the wait time at the checkpoint?" Naccara says. In its first years, TSA wasn't afraid to boast about these metrics to Congress or the public. But moving to a risk-based approach could send both of them in the wrong direction. Fewer than 12,000 items a month will henceforth be confiscated at Logan, because fewer will be banned from planes. It's unclear what will happen with wait times as more randomness and complexity are injected into the screening process. An increase in secondary screenings, focused on more serious threats, coupled with greater use of behavioral profiling, can lead to longer interviews and detainments, albeit for fewer passengers.

Naccara is trying to supplant those metrics with new onesfor example, arrests based on behavioral profiling. He also tries to highlight the savings from not shutting down a terminal because of a screwdriver found in a carry-on bag. But he admits that it's an "extremely difficult issue," and he worries that the risk concepts will be lost on the public.

Herein lies a classic security conundrumjust as relevant to one of the most serious security threats in the country as to someone buckling up a seat belt in a car: "How do you measure the effectiveness of deterrence?" Naccara asks.