The administration is quietly and aggressively defending airport security policies against what they see as a media frenzy of distorted information.
The White House and the Department of Homeland Security indicated today that they won’t yield to demands to amend new airline passenger screening rules that have been decried as wildly intrusive.
On the contrary, administration officials are quietly and aggressively defending the policies against what they see as a media frenzy of distorted information. For instance, the administration noted that fewer than one half of one percent of the 34 million passengers who traveled on airplanes in or to the U.S. last week were subjected to crotch-area pat-downs.
They also disputed the very notion of a public backlash, even as those words played ubiquitously on news tickers and as video parodies of the Transportation Safety Administration were being emailed around the globe. Before press coverage of the new rules reached a roar late last week, TSA received only 700 complaints nationwide about its procedures, an administration official said. The official insisted on anonymity because the information was not intended for public release. The issue is sensitive because physical space intrusions are just about the last thing an administration cast by Republicans as prone to governmental overreach needs.
In airports where body screening technology is available, about one in every 100 passengers are given pat-downs, according to another official, Sean Smith, the DHS spokesperson.
The White House is coordinating a response to what it views as dramatically overblown press coverage of a policy that most Americans say they support. Recent polls conducted by Gallup and CBS News suggest that 80 percent of Americans accept the new procedures. Officials worry about a deliberately disruptive “opt out” protest that is being informally organized online for November 24, contending that it would jeopardize security and cause long travel delays during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
As the new rules took effect last week, the cable news stations and popular websites were consumed with the story. This morning, the Drudge Report had 10 separate items about incidents nationwide. To make matters worse for the administration, the rollout of the pat-down rules coincided with protests by pilots' unions over rules requiring them go through the body scanning machines. In studying the media's coverage, officials have come to conclude that a slow news week, combined with the president's being overseas and Congress being out of session, created the perfect storm of bad coverage. The administration responded slowly to the gathering storm at first, not wanting to add wind to it, according to the official. But the lack of an immediate response might have created a larger vacuum for the story to fill.
The TSA has begun to respond to “myths” about the body scanning machines and pat-downs on its website and through Twitter. TSA administrator John Pistole recorded a video explainer and has been a ubiquitous television presence.
The administration has prepared a series of talking points for surrogates to defend the policy on television. They’re also distributing sympathetic statements by terror victims, including Frank Duggan, who heads a group of family members of those killed when Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed over Scotland in 1988.
“More than 2 million passengers travel every day in the United States, and by all accounts, they are overwhelmingly cooperating with these measures,” said Smith. “Ninety-nine percent of passengers choose to go through an AIT machine where they have that option, and the number of complaints on the pat-downs relative to people who receive them is minuscule.”
Officials at TSA said this morning that they continue to issue guidance to shift leaders about the types of pat-downs that are appropriate for children 12 and under, as well as for passengers who have religious or cultural objections to direct physical contact.
“I think the scanning and the pat-downs, in view of the threat that we are currently facing, are appropriate," said Rick "Ozzie" Nelson, a counterterrorism expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "But at the same time, I think that TSA and DHS could have done a better job in explaining to the American people why they are appropriate and exactly how they will be usually. That’s caused some of the overblown response to this."
Meanwhile, President Obama is standing behind the program. The president said this weekend that while he understands the “frustrations” that the policies seem to have caused, "at this point, TSA in consultation with counterterrorism experts have indicated to me that the procedures that they have been putting in place are the only ones right now that they consider to be effective against the kind of threat that we saw in the Christmas Day bombing."
Obama was referring to the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who hid explosives in his underwear before boarding a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit last December. Government officials believe Abdulmutallab had been counseled to do so by his Al Qaeda trainers, who were hoping to take advantage of what they’d perceived as a loose string in the American security net.
Opponents of the policy believe that children should be exempt from screening and that the government should instruct TSA officers to ethnically profile passengers. Officials counter that such profiling, even setting aside the arguments about prejudice, would significantly increase the pool of those screened, because the TSA already uses behavioral and country-of-origin profiling when determining whom to subject to secondary screenings, and because terrorists have recruited people with Anglicized names. Only profiling all persons of color, a controversial and likely illegal measure, would likely have kept Abdulmutallab off the plane given the procedures in place at the time, government officials said.
Passengers who refuse to move through a full-body scanner--which detects anomalies by bouncing radio waves off their bodies--are subject to the intrusive pat-downs. So are passengers whose scans reveal something hidden, as well as passengers who pass through garden-variety magnetometers and set off alarms.
In testimony before Congress, Pistole conceded that the machines used by the TSA have a larger false positive rate than he would like, and he said that the agency is studying technology used by airports in Holland that projects the image of a person onto a generic video mannequin.
Nelson said that the administration and the public "need to have an open-ended dialogue" about "exactly what we want."
"You put DHS in a really unfair position," he said. "You expect them to provide 100 percent security, but at the same time you object to some of the things that not only DHS but Congress and security experts think we need to do."
National Journal
On the contrary, administration officials are quietly and aggressively defending the policies against what they see as a media frenzy of distorted information. For instance, the administration noted that fewer than one half of one percent of the 34 million passengers who traveled on airplanes in or to the U.S. last week were subjected to crotch-area pat-downs.
They also disputed the very notion of a public backlash, even as those words played ubiquitously on news tickers and as video parodies of the Transportation Safety Administration were being emailed around the globe. Before press coverage of the new rules reached a roar late last week, TSA received only 700 complaints nationwide about its procedures, an administration official said. The official insisted on anonymity because the information was not intended for public release. The issue is sensitive because physical space intrusions are just about the last thing an administration cast by Republicans as prone to governmental overreach needs.
In airports where body screening technology is available, about one in every 100 passengers are given pat-downs, according to another official, Sean Smith, the DHS spokesperson.
The White House is coordinating a response to what it views as dramatically overblown press coverage of a policy that most Americans say they support. Recent polls conducted by Gallup and CBS News suggest that 80 percent of Americans accept the new procedures. Officials worry about a deliberately disruptive “opt out” protest that is being informally organized online for November 24, contending that it would jeopardize security and cause long travel delays during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.
As the new rules took effect last week, the cable news stations and popular websites were consumed with the story. This morning, the Drudge Report had 10 separate items about incidents nationwide. To make matters worse for the administration, the rollout of the pat-down rules coincided with protests by pilots' unions over rules requiring them go through the body scanning machines. In studying the media's coverage, officials have come to conclude that a slow news week, combined with the president's being overseas and Congress being out of session, created the perfect storm of bad coverage. The administration responded slowly to the gathering storm at first, not wanting to add wind to it, according to the official. But the lack of an immediate response might have created a larger vacuum for the story to fill.
The TSA has begun to respond to “myths” about the body scanning machines and pat-downs on its website and through Twitter. TSA administrator John Pistole recorded a video explainer and has been a ubiquitous television presence.
The administration has prepared a series of talking points for surrogates to defend the policy on television. They’re also distributing sympathetic statements by terror victims, including Frank Duggan, who heads a group of family members of those killed when Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed over Scotland in 1988.
“More than 2 million passengers travel every day in the United States, and by all accounts, they are overwhelmingly cooperating with these measures,” said Smith. “Ninety-nine percent of passengers choose to go through an AIT machine where they have that option, and the number of complaints on the pat-downs relative to people who receive them is minuscule.”
Officials at TSA said this morning that they continue to issue guidance to shift leaders about the types of pat-downs that are appropriate for children 12 and under, as well as for passengers who have religious or cultural objections to direct physical contact.
“I think the scanning and the pat-downs, in view of the threat that we are currently facing, are appropriate," said Rick "Ozzie" Nelson, a counterterrorism expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "But at the same time, I think that TSA and DHS could have done a better job in explaining to the American people why they are appropriate and exactly how they will be usually. That’s caused some of the overblown response to this."
Meanwhile, President Obama is standing behind the program. The president said this weekend that while he understands the “frustrations” that the policies seem to have caused, "at this point, TSA in consultation with counterterrorism experts have indicated to me that the procedures that they have been putting in place are the only ones right now that they consider to be effective against the kind of threat that we saw in the Christmas Day bombing."
Obama was referring to the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who hid explosives in his underwear before boarding a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit last December. Government officials believe Abdulmutallab had been counseled to do so by his Al Qaeda trainers, who were hoping to take advantage of what they’d perceived as a loose string in the American security net.
Opponents of the policy believe that children should be exempt from screening and that the government should instruct TSA officers to ethnically profile passengers. Officials counter that such profiling, even setting aside the arguments about prejudice, would significantly increase the pool of those screened, because the TSA already uses behavioral and country-of-origin profiling when determining whom to subject to secondary screenings, and because terrorists have recruited people with Anglicized names. Only profiling all persons of color, a controversial and likely illegal measure, would likely have kept Abdulmutallab off the plane given the procedures in place at the time, government officials said.
Passengers who refuse to move through a full-body scanner--which detects anomalies by bouncing radio waves off their bodies--are subject to the intrusive pat-downs. So are passengers whose scans reveal something hidden, as well as passengers who pass through garden-variety magnetometers and set off alarms.
In testimony before Congress, Pistole conceded that the machines used by the TSA have a larger false positive rate than he would like, and he said that the agency is studying technology used by airports in Holland that projects the image of a person onto a generic video mannequin.
Nelson said that the administration and the public "need to have an open-ended dialogue" about "exactly what we want."
"You put DHS in a really unfair position," he said. "You expect them to provide 100 percent security, but at the same time you object to some of the things that not only DHS but Congress and security experts think we need to do."
National Journal
