According to media reports a TSA screener decided to help herself to $5000 in cash from someone’s jacket as it passed through security. 

Let’s take a moment to think about the brazeness of such a thing.

Now, think about this:  How much does it cost to corrupt an FBI agent?  How much would it cost or what would have to be done to corrupt an Immigration and Customs agent?  How about your local police officer?  In almost all cases, it’s pretty hard to put a price on that kind of act for most people.

What we do know is that when law enforcement people are poorly trained and poorly paid, the most we can expect is justice at a price and the worst is corruption. 

So, if a TSA officer thinks its quite possible to take $5000 from a passenger putting a coat through security, how much would it cost to corrupt that TSA officer into permitting a threat to security to pass through unnoticed?  Probably as little as $5000 is my guess.  And that’s pretty cheap to a terrorist, I suspect.

If a TSA officer is willing to steal from passengers and if a group is found to continually have such lapses in a particular airport such as JFK in New York City, how good is our security?

Damn bad in my opinion.   And instead of addressing security theater, our department of Homeland Security continues to insist that the vast majority of TSA officers are good.  That may even be true but it would appear that there is enough of a rotten core to certainly be a serious weakness in security. 

After flying for most of my life and that equates to approximately 41 years of flying, I feel no safer today than I did at the beginning and, in some ways, I feel a lot less safe because we don’t require ethics, training and strong morale in our security.  Instead, we require sexual assaults in order to be permitted to get on an airplane.

Filed under: Airports by ajax