Jennifer Morgan from San Diego, CA was able to accidentally carry a switch blade knife with a four inch folding blade in a zippered purse compartment through a TSA security inspection at San Diego International Airport (SAN) with being detected.
In a separate but similar incident, an Indianapolis woman, Sara K. Gallienne passed through airport security at Richmond International Airport (RIC) and again at another Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoint at T. F. Green Airport (PVD) in Warwick, Rhode Island, without agents becoming aware of the 3-inch blade SOG knife, as reported on Monday, July 19, 2011 by KGTV 10News San Diego, WPRI-TV CBS 12 in Providence, RI, WXIN-TV Fox 59 in Indianapolis, IN, and other news sources.
The recent intrusions of two potentially dangerous weapon happened late last week.
Ms. Gallienne, who was traveling from Richmond, VA to Warwick, RI, and then back to her home in Indianapolis, has filed a formal complaint with the TSA over their lapse in security, as seen in the attached slide show and video clip.
While Ms. Morgan's knife went undetected in San Diego, she was eventually stopped on her return flight at Salt Lake City International Airport (SLC), where she was fined $250 for forgetting to remove the knife from her purse, and then chose to mail it back to her San Diego home.
However, the security lapse also troubled her. She decided to go public over it, and contacted the San Diego ABC affiliate, KGTV.
These were not isolated incidents.
Earlier this year, on March 17, 2011, a 37-year-old Florida woman, Evelyn Freay, boarded a JetBlue Airways (B6) flight at Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) to south Florida when she realized that her mother had packed a steak knife and an apple into her 1-year-old baby's bag as a snack. That also went undiscovered.
Last week, on Wednesday, July 13, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) admitted that there were 25,000 security breaches at U.S. airports since 2001, a relatively small figure considering the 5.5 billion passengers who were screened during that same period.
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report added that the joint vulnerability assessments were conducted at only 17 percent of the nation’s 457 airports.
This infuriated Congressman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations, who said to TSA Assistant Administrator John Sammon, a witness at the hearing, "The fact that you have not conducted joint vulnerability assessments at 83 percent of our airports is not acceptable."
The TSA in San Diego said agents do catch the most serious threats.
According to San Diego's TSA director Mike Aguilar, "During this same time frame when this report came out, here in San Diego, we caught two guns and a hand grenade. You know, that wasn't reported."
However, in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, 25,000 security breaches cannot easily be ignored.
What is even more irksome to passengers is the seemingly arbitrary way which airport screeners perform alleged intrusive searches on children, the elderly, and those disabled.
Defending the formal complaint made against the agency, a TSA spokesperson in Richmond, VA also tried to diminish not finding Ms. Gallienne's knife, saying, "We continue to take the discovery of knives and other prohibited items seriously. However, in today's post-9/11 security environment, intelligence tells us our officers' greatest focus needs to be the biggest threat to aviation today, explosives and explosives components."
Tell us your thoughts. Please leave comments below or by email and subscribe to get future updates. There is also expanded coverage of other recent news articles. You may also wish to follow our dispatches as the News Analysis Examiner.
Comments