TSA's quick embrace of technology prompts questions

WASHINGTON — Before full-body scanners, there were puffers.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) spent about $30 million on devices that puffed air on travelers to "sniff" them out for explosives residue. Those machines ended up in warehouses, removed from airports, abandoned as impractical.

The massive push to fix airport security after the Sept. 11 attacks led to a gold rush in technology contracts for an industry that mushroomed almost overnight. Since it was founded in 2001, the TSA has spent about $14 billion in more than 20,900 transactions with dozens of contractors.

In addition to beefing up fleets of X-ray machines and traditional security systems at airports, about $8 billion was paid for ambitious new technologies. The agency has spent about $800 million on devices to screen bags and passenger items, including shoes, bottled liquids, casts and prostheses. It wants more than $1.3 billion for airport screening technologies next year.

But lawmakers, auditors and national-security experts question whether the government is too quick to embrace technology as a solution for basic security problems and whether TSA has been too eager to write checks for unproven products.

"We always want the best, the latest and greatest technology against terrorists, but that's not necessarily the smartest way to spend your money and your efforts," said Kip Hawley, TSA's director from 2005 until last year. "We see a technology that looks promising, and the temptation is to run to deploy it before we fully understand how it integrates with the multiple layers we already have in place, like using a watch list, training officers at every checkpoint to look for suspicious behavior and using some pat-downs."

Some say the fact that the United States hasn't had another 9/11-level terrorist attack shows the money was well-spent.

But government auditors have faulted TSA and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, for failing to properly test and evaluate technology before spending money on it.

The puffer machines, for example, were an early TSA attempt at improving electronic screening. Designed to dislodge explosive particles by shooting air blasts at passengers, the detectors turned out to be unreliable and expensive to operate. But they were deployed in many airports before TSA had tested them fully, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The agency stopped buying and deploying puffer machines in June 2006. The GAO said in an October 2009 report that 116 puffers were in storage. A TSA spokesman said the agency had "since disposed of" the machines or transferred them to other agencies.

Government auditors also expressed concerns that TSA hasn't done good assessments of the risks, cost benefits or performances of other new screening technologies.

In other cases, equipment to trace explosives and other devices for screening passengers have had technical problems and projected cost overruns, according to a recent GAO report.

The full-body scanners that have made headlines in recent weeks for their revealing images of passengers were tested more thoroughly than puffer machines, the GAO has found. But auditors faulted the agency for not justifying their cost fully, saying the agency's plan to double the number of scanners will require more personnel to run and maintain them — an expense of as much as $2.4 billion.

John Huey, an airport-security expert, said TSA's contracts with vendors to buy more equipment and devices often aren't done in a "systematic way."

"TSA has an obsession of finding a single box that will solve all its problems," Huey said. "They've spent and wasted money looking for that one box, and there is no such solution. ... They respond to congressional mandates and the latest headlines of attempted terrorist attacks without any thought to risk management or separating out the threats in a logical way."

TSA officials disagree. They say responsible processes are in place to research, develop and fund new security technologies. And they note some gee-whiz equipment that vendors have pitched has taken too long to develop or has been too expensive to produce.

"We have to be predictive and acquire the best technology today to address the known threats by being informed of the latest intelligence and be proactive in working on what could be the next threats," TSA Administrator John Pistole said. "It is a tall order."

He said technology isn't the only security effort under way. TSA uses a combination of tactics, including terrorist watch lists, intelligence gathering and training security officers, to look for suspicious behavior.

The billions of dollars the TSA has spent on technology has been "a good investment," Pistole said, but he said developing devices is full of risk. "It is a lot of art with the science. We're always competing for the best technology at the best price. It is just a constantly changing dynamic environment."

After 9/11, there was talk of cargo containers that could withstand explosions, for example, but airport-security experts said they never came to fruition, in part because they were too heavy and airlines didn't want to pay for extra fuel to carry them.

Another much talked-about device, a shoe scanner that would allow passengers to keep their shoes on while going through a checkpoint, has not been deployed fully. Twelve companies are vying to provide shoe scanners to U.S. airports, but the TSA has not chosen one.

Part of the problem is that experts disagree about what constitutes an effective airport-security system, and policymakers are reluctant to embrace some techniques — such as profiling — that society finds objectionable.

"Since the introduction of metal detectors in the 1970s, technologies have been bought and cobbled together in a somewhat piecemeal approach," said Tom LaTourrette, a security expert at RAND Corp., a nonprofit research institute. "No one has been able to provide a satisfactory answer to the question of how to best structure aviation security."