"The Other Side of Security"

Thursday, December 23, 2004

The Other Side of Security
TSA Screeners Manage the Scary, the Boring -- and the Messy
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
The Washington (DC) Post


It is 4 p.m. at Reagan National Airport and the lines of anxious passengers
eager to leave Washington are now backed up at the south security checkpoint
in a line about 50 people long. Suddenly, there is a small crisis at the
checkpoint's lane four. 

Federal airline security screener Krista Knieriem had been smoothly moving
bags along the conveyor belt as she looked up at a multicolored screen.
There had been a delay just moments ago, when she spotted a fork -- a
prohibited item -- in someone's carry-on bag; another screener removed it.
But now the bags are backed up, and a traveler's sandwich, packed in a
plastic takeout box, gets smashed between two bins. Suddenly, tuna salad is
tumbling down the belt, as everyone in the vicinity can tell by the odor.
"Oh, oh!" says the male passenger who brought the sandwich. Knieriem stops
the X-ray belt, and she and her co-workers scramble to clean it up. One
picks up tuna salad -- with lots of mayo -- from the floor while passengers
stand on their toes to peek at what the holdup is all about. Within seconds,
another screener appears with a roll of paper towels and a spray bottle
filled with cleaner. Just as quickly as it spread, the confusion dies down. 
 
"It happens all the time," said Knieriem, who apologizes to the man with the
sandwich, who, in turn, apologizes for holding up the line. "Coffee is the
thing that spills the most. Ev-er-y day," she adds for emphasis. 

The Transportation Security Administration has come under fire from
passengers complaining about security procedures. Some claim that rules
about removing their shoes before walking through security vary from airport
to airport. Others have complained about up-close-and-personal pat-downs and
unpredictable wait times. 

Last week, The Washington Post spent a day with one of TSA's screeners at
National Airport to get a sense of a typical day on the other side of the
security checkpoint. No one hears passenger complaints more often than
security screeners, who must learn a variety of techniques to deal with the
mundane, the scary -- and the occasional traveler who doesn't want to abide
by the rules. 

At National, like most airports, the TSA staff is short-handed. Nearly 20
percent of the 45,000 employees TSA hired after the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks have quit or been fired over the past year, and the agency
only now is beginning to replace them. With an average salary of $30,258,
the airport's 433 TSA screeners are commonly asked to work mandatory
overtime, with an average total of about 46 hours a week. Holidays are
nearly impossible to get off. 

The hours are particularly tense during the holiday travel season, which
officially kicked off last weekend. More than 188,000 people are expected to
fly out of the region's three major airports today, the busiest airline
travel day of this holiday season. 

Reading Passengers 

The day of a security screener often begins at 4:30 a.m., when most people
are sound asleep. If screeners are short-staffed or off to a slow start in
the early morning, the longer lines tend to drag much longer into the day.
Some mornings, passengers wait more than a hour to get through the
checkpoint. 

Before the shift starts at 5 a.m., screeners huddle in the break room or a
conference room with a supervisor to receive the latest information about
threats to aviation and new gadgets to watch out for. Last Thursday, a TSA
supervisor briefed more than a dozen screeners about a new computer memory
device made by Swiss Army that is also equipped with a small knife. 

The supervisor calls the roll and then screeners are assigned their first
duty at one of several stations: "wanding" passengers, managing the flow
through metal detectors, X-ray examination, monitoring the exit lane and a
job the screeners call "town crier." That one calls for one screener to
stand with a small microphone and remind passengers to take off their coats
and remove laptops from their bags before moving through the checkpoint.
Every 30 minutes, they rotate positions. 

Like workers in a hospital emergency ward, the screeners take their posts
and encounter one small drama after another. They move around constantly,
trying to strike a balance with passengers -- at times trying to show a
sense of humor, such as the time a female passenger is asked to remove her
belt and she offers to take it all off -- but also a sense of duty, such as
the time screeners hush a man in line who begins to talk loudly about not
having a bomb in his bag. 

Knieriem, a cheerful 25-year-old who wears her hair in two braided buns on
the side of her head, starts off wanding select passengers who alarm the
metal detector. First, she waves the detector over an elderly woman, then a
young Japanese woman who doesn't speak much English and then a woman wearing
all black with a swooping hat. In between each pat-down, Knieriem moves with
lightning speed to quickly unzip and peek inside the passengers' carry-on
items. 
 
Within 15 minutes, Knieriem has whizzed back and forth a half-dozen times
from the X-ray machine to an area the screeners call the "fish bowl," where
passengers receive a pat-down. Knieriem said her former job as a manager of
a custom frame store helps her to quickly "read" each passenger to get a
sense of how comfortable they are with having a metal detector waved over
their bodies and being touched on their chests. 

"Retail experience has helped me with this job," Knieriem said. Most
travelers "know the drill," she said. But a few times a week, she gets a
passenger who gets angry for one reason or another and explodes. Most of the
time, she said, passengers get angry because they think they know the rules
-- such as whether they can wear shoes through the walk-through metal
detector -- but the rules have changed. "I try not to take it personally,"
she said. 

Meeting Steady Tests 

TSA's policy requires that passengers be screened by someone of the same
sex. Most women don't appear to enjoy having Knieriem touch between and
around their breasts. "It's nobody's favorite thing to do," she said, but no
passengers have complained to her. The trick, she said, is to complete the
pat-down quickly and explain everything upfront. "You have to inform people
what you're going to do, otherwise they think you're just doing something on
your own." 

Later, when Knieriem switches posts, moving to the X-ray machine, she
quickly analyzes each bag on the belt, each of which appear to the untrained
eye as a junkyard of metal spaghetti. Men's shoes appear with metal slabs
inside -- arch support, she explains. Women's heels stand out with their
scary-looking metal spikes and nails. Knieriem can quickly identify each as
harmless or a potential threat. 

"See that long pointy thing?" she asks, pointing to what resembles a long
hypodermic needle in someone's bag. "Electric toothbrush." She correctly
guesses what kind of car one passenger drives by the shape of the key on the
key chain. "Do you drive a Jetta?" she asks. Inside another bag, she points
to a circular object. "White House ornament," she said. "You see a lot of
those." 

Chirp! Chirp! Moments later, a passenger has brought a bird in a cage
through the checkpoint two lanes over. The bird's owner is holding the
animal and has placed the bird's cage on the X-ray belt. Part of the
screeners' job is to make sure passengers don't accidentally put animals
through the X-ray machines. 

The TSA screeners see all kinds of animals, Knieriem said. They also see
movie stars such as Kevin Spacey and politicians such as Richard A.
Gephardt. More VIPs come through here than any other airport, said Patrick
D. Hynes, TSA's security director at National. 

Of course, the main job is detecting explosives and weapons. The TSA is
constantly training screeners to do the job better. Every week, a few
screeners disguise themselves and try to get through the checkpoint with
guns strapped to their legs or hidden inside a teddy bear. Since they
started the covert tests, the screeners' performance has improved
dramatically, Hynes said, but he declined to disclose the results. 

"We need to be a step above every other airport because we're in the
nation's capital," Hynes said. 

Knieriem said she can recognize her co-workers in the funny outfits most of
the time. "It's the same people lately," she said. But she is tested in
other ways. 

Late in her shift, she stops the X-ray belt, pushes a button that makes a
light on the X-ray machine flash and asks a co-worker to look at something
suspicious. 

"Can I get an ETD?" she says in a loud voice, which means she wants a bag
screened for explosives. She asks if this is a test. Sometimes the screen
displays an explosive device that is really a false image projected onto the
screen. 

Another screener, Marvin Whetstone, recognizes the object: a breathing
machine for people with sleep apnea. A passenger nearby confirms that it's
his device. 

"Oh, okay. Sorry," Knieriem said. Just another potential terrorist threat
that turned out to be nothing. 

Attached Photo:

TSA screener Krista Knieriem grimaces after a food container bursts open,
spilling tuna salad and lettuce on the X-ray conveyor belt.

other_side.jpg