Security Theatre

This chapter investigates the Kafkaesque procedures involved in data-driven airport security. It considers the experience of a passenger who keeps being selected for a special security check. While waiting in line for the security check, he has a conversation with another passenger who had been suffering the same drama for four years. The passenger recounts how he has been trying to find a way to get off the list, but the Transportation Security Administration officers do not seem to know why a passenger is on it. Moreover, there is no process to get off it. A man told the passenger once that not even the people that programmed the system know why a person is selected; they do not know what the critical data points are because the system self-learns.

Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Aptitude Alignment Job Role Study (JRS) for Travel Document Checker (TDC) Position

The current study investigated individual differences and their relationship to performance while fulfilling the Travel Document Checker job role at security screening checkpoints. It is part of a larger effort to understand variability in performance across different job roles that Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) routinely fulfill. Vigilance, task-focused coping and avoidance-focused coping explained the most variance in counterfeit detection. Future efforts should validate these findings and determine individual difference characteristics that are meaningful predictors of performance across other checkpoint job roles.

Research on explosive vapour detection system for high level security check of terrorist explosives

The terrorist attacks that occurred in the US on 11 September 2001 ushered in an era of increased security and tighter restrictions for those wishing to travel by aeroplane. In 2015, an article by ABC News revealed that an internal investigation of the Transportation Security Administration showed significant security failures at numerous airports across the US. Undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives and banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 per cent of cases. One of the main reasons for mock explosives and banned weapons getting through checkpoints is the increase in the amount of travellers and volume of cargo. Aeroplanes need to be able to take off on time, so inspecting 100 per cent of the goods and people that are travelling is practically impossible. A team of researchers based within the National Institute of Technology, Toyama College in Japan is tackling this problem by investigating a means of developing an explosive vapour detection system. Associate Professor Yotsumi Yoshii and Professor Iwao Mizumoto are leading the project, the aim of which is to facilitate high-level security checks for terrorist explosives and therefore prevent disastrous events in the future

Does Perceptions of Organizational Prestige Mediate the Relationship Between Public Service Motivation, Job Satisfaction, and the Turnover Intentions of Federal Employees?

Public opinion polls consistently suggest that government employment is not considered to be highly prestigious by most Americans. These negative images are likely to stifle the public sector’s recruitment and retention efforts. Scholars have suggested that individuals with high levels of public service motivation (PSM) are better equipped to work in these environments, yet no studies can be found that have directly explored the relationships between PSM and the perceptions that public employees hold regarding the images that citizens hold of their organizations. This article sought to fill this gap in the literature by exploring the extent to which perceptions of organizational prestige (POP) mediate the relationship between PSM and the job satisfaction and turnover intentions of public employees. Using a sample of federal employees working for the Transportation Security Administration in Oregon, this study found that POP fully mediated the relationship between PSM and turnover intentions and partially mediated the relationship between PSM and job satisfaction. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Using Risk-Based Security to Quantify the Number of Firearms Missed at Airport Security Checkpoints

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is responsible for protecting the nation's air transportation system. Risk-based security is a paradigm for aligning security resources (i.e., personnel, technology, and time) with security risks. PreCheck is one approach that the TSA uses to implement this strategy. Given that passengers enrolled in PreCheck undergo background checks and fingerprinting, they experience expedited screening at airport security checkpoints, with standard screening lanes dedicated to passengers not enrolled in PreCheck. This difference can favorably impact the TSA’s ability to detect threat items like firearms. This paper uses publicly available data on firearm detection, number of passengers screened, and the fraction of passenger screenings in PreCheck lanes to estimate the number of firearms missed at airport security checkpoints in the United States. To achieve this, it defines risky firearms as firearms carried by passengers not enrolled in PreCheck and assumes that only standard screening lanes are where such firearms are brought to checkpoints. Under this assumption, the number of risky firearms missed in the recent past is estimated, given more current risky firearm detection rates. This analysis suggests that increasing the number of PreCheck passenger screenings may reduce the number of undetected risky firearms passing through security checkpoints.

How AI Manufactures a Smile: Tung-Hui Hu Interviews Artist Elisa Giardina Papa on Digital Labor

This conversation between scholar and poet Tung-Hui Hu and artist Elisa Giardina Papa addresses new forms of precarious labor emerging within artificial intelligence economies. Together they examine a global infrastructure of low-paid human microworkers who “clean” data and train machine vision algorithms, labelling, categorizing, annotating, and validating massive quantities of visual data. Hu and Giardina Papa discuss methods and psychological theories underpinning affective computing in the context of Giardina Papa’s latest art project, which explores the labor of producing and cleansing data sets of human expressions. A number of AI systems that supposedly recognize, interpret, and simulate human affects base their algorithms on flawed understandings of human emotions as universal, authentic, and transparent. Increasingly, tech companies and American government agencies like the Transportation Security Administration are leveraging this supposed transparency to develop software that identifies, on the one hand, consumers’ moods and, on the other hand, potentially dangerous airline passengers. In this exchange, Hu and Giardina Papa consider both the historical and present-day implications of this demand for legibility and transparency.

Packers, dilators and the options for either male or female: Navigating movement of transgender and gender non-conforming bodies, appearances and luggage through airport security

In this article, we investigate the experiences of transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) individuals leading up to and moving through Transportation Security Administration (TSA) airport lines. We used a qualitative research method and analysed fourteen in-depth interviews of TGNC individuals. Based upon analysis of the data, three larger themes emerged, each with several subthemes. First, the TGNC participants engaged in extra packing or had additional packing considerations. Second, as participants moved through security, they frequently experienced gender confusion from the TSA agents. Lastly, participants actively thought about passing, or tried to dress in a way where they were perceived as passing as a binary gender. TGNC bodies are rendered as potential threats in binary spaces, specifically those spaces with the purpose of surveillance. In the case of TSA, they disrupt hegemonic expectations surrounding gender and require additional emotional, physical and financial labour. Despite proactivity from other parties to gain them equal access to binary spaces, TGNC individuals still experience, in some cases, additional scrutiny, observation and intensified analysis before being granted access through entryways deemed suitable only to the long-standing hierarchy of the gender binary.

Simulation Model to Support Security Screening Checkpoint Operations in Airport Terminals

Since 2001 the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has implemented security screening checkpoints (SSCPs) in the terminals of 440 airports in the U.S.A. The purpose of SSCPs is to prevent prohibited items from being brought onto aircraft. The screening procedure incurs delay to every traveler. This article reports the development of a discrete event simulation model capable of modeling the screening procedures within a SSCP in detail. The model replicates a SSCP at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport (PHX) and represents the equipment and activities in the SSCP with 153 nodes, 106 links, two sources, two sinks, and 35 servers. The coded model was calibrated with field data collected primarily at PHX. The potential applications of the model were demonstrated via two experiments: (a) increasing the number of TSA staff; (b) reducing the number of screening lanes. The experiments demonstrated that this microscopic simulation approach captured the queue length and waiting time of every internal process within the SSCP. These performance data helped to identify the hot spots within the SSCP so that improvements to the waiting time could be made by focusing on the problematic components.