I'll put it bluntly - the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) sucks.

Via Cryptome, I found this in the Federal Register for January 11, 2006:

TSA receives approximately 2,000 tort claims per month arising from airport screening activities and other circumstances, including motor vehicle accidents and employee loss.

That's 24,000 complaints per year from passengers who felt like something significant had happened to them by or on behalf of the TSA.

TSA has approximately 45,000 screeners so it looks like they're getting 1 complaint for every 2 screeners, per year.  Of course they do screen some 35 million passengers a month, so perhaps that number isn't as high as it could be.

However that 24,000 complaints are those which are filed with the TSA.  Many people are entirely too frightened to do or say anything if they've been mistreated.

Remember the theory behind the creation of the TSA?  Before 9/11, airports provided private security for airlines.  They were lax, inefficient and sometimes downright incompetent.

Then post-9/11, the government decided to create an entire federal agency to streamline the process and provide better security.  But it's been expensive:

In the rush to hire airport screeners after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the newly formed Transportation Security Administration spent as much as $143,432 per screener on recruitment in Topeka, Kansas, according to a report released Monday.

The TSA hired a company, NCS Pearson, to recruit screeners soon after Congress ordered it to replace private airport screeners with a government work force by November 19, 2002.

Lawmakers later criticized the TSA for its spending after they learned the recruiters worked out of lavish resort hotels with golf courses, pools and spas.

NCS Pearson ended up costing the TSA (and therefore the taxpayers) some 741 million dollars just to hire screeners.  Check out the TSA announcement when they gave the contract to NCS Pearson - the total was supposed to be just 103.4 million.

Yet check out this:

On March 4, TSA hired NCS Pearson, a firm based in Eden Prairie, Minn., for an estimated $103 million. The award surprised many contractors and government officials familiar with federal human resources because NCS Pearson had little experience conducting federal HR work. Critics contended that no firm without previous experience would be able to handle the paper trail requirements, rules and the need for extensive demographic data in standard formats required in federal hiring. But TSA's leaders were determined to avoid standard federal procedures, since the aviation law freed them from federal hiring regulations and allowed them to adopt a private sector model.

Indeed.  Despite the company's lack of experience in hiring people for federal positions, NCS Pearson's lucky year was 2002:

NCS Pearson Inc. has won two federal government contracts worth $160 million, the company announced Oct. 10. The deals include a three-year, $118 million contract from the Department of Health and Human Services and a three-year, $42 million contract from the Department of Defense. Under the HHS contract, NCS Pearson Government Solutions Inc. will operate and manage the toll-free help line for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Before getting "lucky" in 2002, NCS Pearson used to run educational tests in Minnesota.  From here:

In the spring of 2000, NCS Pearson, a national leader in test administration with a multi-decade history of reliability and integrity, discovered it had incorrectly scored thousands of math tests for Minnesota high school students. Media statewide pounced on the error. PSB advised NCS Pearson to meet the dilemma head-on, to which the company agreed, and follow a four-point remedy to make amends: reimburse graduation costs; offer a tuition credit; repay the state for notification costs; and complete an in-house audit.

That's a condensation of the disaster.  It actually cost the company 12 million dollars.  The Pearson tests caused 8,000 high school students to "fail", preventing some of them from getting their diplomas.  It took a lawsuit and 2 years before NCS Pearson admitted its error (in which the judge concluded that NCS had a long history of shoddy quality control).  And most importantly, the State of Minnesota ended its contract with NCS Pearson because of the error.

NCS Pearson later screwed up more educational tests in Virginia and New York City (2001), preventing more kids from graduating high school.  NCS has also made test scoring errors in Arizona, California, Washington, Florida, Ohio and Michigan.

One of the reasons that NCS Pearson charged 10,000 dollars per screener hired is that NCS Pearson used its copyrighted psychological test, known as the MMPI-2 (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2).  You can read a little bit about MMPI-2 here:

The MMPI-2 consists of 567 statements to which the subject responds with true, false, or cannot say. It was designed primarily for adults and has not yet been used for children (although the 1992 MMPI-A was designed for adolescents). The items cover a wide range of topics, including attitudes on religion and sexual practices, perceptions of health, political ideas, information on family, education, and occupation, and displays of symptoms known to be exhibited by certain groups of mentally disturbed people.

The copyright to this test actually belongs to the University of Minnesota but NCS Pearson is the only company licensed to use it.  Well it sounds good for the TSA to want to hire a company to weed out the psychopaths, right?  From here:

The MMPI is used in a variety of settings. Its primary use is by the clinical psychologist who is trying to understand the psychiatric symptoms and personality characteristics of his or her patient or test subject. Another use is by researchers trying to correlate personality variables to types of illness, critical life events, habitual behaviors, or other psychological variables. But probably, after its clinical function, the most common use of the MMPI is in forensic settings, e.g., criminal hearings, workman's compensation evaluations, etc. The most controversial use of the MMPI is probably in personnel evaluation.

And it is controversial.  There have been several court challenges to the use of MMPI and similar tests.  That's because the MMPI has some very invasive questions:

The 502-item version of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) included such true-false items as "I have never indulged in any unusual sex practices," "I have difficulty in starting or holding my bowel movements," and "I go to church almost every week."

So now we know NCS Pearson likes to conduct very invasive (and expensive) psychological profiles for the TSA.  But how did NCS Pearson get so "lucky" with all those federal contracts in 2002?  Well it helps to have friends in high places (props go to teacherken).

It all starts with a man named Alexander "Sandy" Kress.  From here:

Ten years ago, public school accountability was a vague, unenforceable ideal from free market enthusiasts who wanted to see schools run more like businesses. Kress, a Dallas lawyer, was serving what would be his last, tumultuous term as president of the Dallas school board. Fellow board members were calling the newspaper to denounce him as a racist and a bully. The fortunes of the reform movement and of Kress have risen together. He is one of the principal designers of No Child Left Behind, and has used his knowledge and connections to earn millions as a high-powered lobbyist for test publishers.

One of those "test publishers" that Sandy Kress is a registered lobbyist for is none other than NCS Pearson.  As the article notes, the "No Child Left Behind" law came into effect in January 2002 and NCS Pearson got a major slice of the contracts to make software systems in Texas to conform with NCLB.

Got it? Kress helped invent the NCLB legislation and then he became a lobbyist for the very companies which make a lot of money to administer NCLB.  Kress' biography proudly notes he was a "senior adviser" to President Bush on educational issues.

Kress received several appointments to educational boards in Texas when George Bush was governor.  Kress used to work for Margaret Spellings, who is the Secretary of Education in the Bush administration.  Just like Kress, Spellings worked for Texas Governor Bush and is also "credited" for crafting the NCLB.

Let's connect the dots.  In 2002, NCS Pearson was a company with a shoddy record of conducting and scoring educational tests and very little experience in hiring people for federal positions.  The NCLB law comes into effect in January and immediately afterwards, NCS Pearson hires Sandy Kress as their lobbyist.  Not long afterwards, NCS Pearson wins all kinds of contracts from implementing NCLB to the Department of Defense to DHHS' Medicare to the TSA.

TSA has also wasted 1 billion dollars on a contract to Unisys for maintaining their database, a cost overrun of some 250 million dollars.  The overrun came from charging TSA some 131 dollars per hour for employees who actually received less than half that amount.

And despite all this wastage, TSA still isn't keeping the nation's airports safe.  From the 9/11 Commission:

Improve airline passenger prescreening: [Grade] F

The government's failure to set up an effective screening program that prevents terrorists from getting on airplanes but does not overly invade the privacy of U.S. citizens has many fathers. But most of them are in the bureaucracy, where turf battles, bureaucratic overreach, and its opposite -- inertia -- are rampant.

First of all, the government has failed to integrate all of its various terrorist watch lists into one list that can be effectively used to screen airline passengers. The Transportation Security Administration isn't responsible for merging those lists -- ultimately, the FBI is -- but TSA does manage the existing passenger prescreening program, a piecemeal and cumbersome process that, far from catching many would-be terrorists, has ensnared people unlikely to threaten aviation, including aged grandmothers and Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.

"Few improvements have been made to the existing passenger screening system since right after 9/11," the commissioners wrote.

Few improvements but billions of dollars spent.  What a disgrace...

Is it any wonder that Sioux Falls, SD decided to kick out the TSA and let all security screening be handled by a private company?

Crossposted from Flogging the Simian

Peace