Airport and Aviation Security
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA), formed 19 years ago after the 9/11 attacks, deals with a massive number of different types of threats daily. The main goal of the TSA is to ensure a safe and secure environment within and around the airports. Thus, preventing terror attacks against aviation facilities and aircraft hijacking.
During the 9/11 terrorist attack, the weakness
of the airports' security across the country was revealed, and the TSA has been
founded to establish a higher level of security standards and countermeasures. Unfortunately,
as the security level became more sophisticated, so did the terror
organizations, trying to find new ways and technics to penetrate these
protection layers and threaten the aviation industry worldwide. One of these
types of threats is utilizing insiders to gain access through security and get
the ability to establish a terrorist attack this way. Every generation of
aircraft attackers exploits a new loophole that must be painstakingly plugged -
usually at great expense, but few loopholes will be as difficult and expensive
to close as that posed by determined insiders with intimate knowledge of how
airports work and easy access to targets. (Matthews,2016).
MetroJet 9268
On October 31st, 2015, an Airbus A-321 that departed from Sharm el-Sheikh International Airport to Saint Petersburg, Russia, crashed 23 minutes after take-off, killing 224 passengers and crewmembers onboard. The investigation resulted that the crash was not a mechanical failure but a terrorist attack. It turned out that the soda can bomb smuggled by two airport employees detonated in the air and caused the airplane to explode and fall off the sky. The wake after the explosion of MetroJet 9268 caused airports worldwide to change their security policies towards their employees and tighten up the security vetting for airport staff. The conclusion after the MetroJet attack was that the person or the people who blew up the Metrojet flight had presented the world with a new form of threat: Deadly attacks do not have to be carried out by suicide bombers - or even by passengers. (Matthews, 2016).
TSA Countermeasures
The TSA is making significant efforts to
prevent attacks on aviation facilities. After the attacks of September 11,
2011, great emphasis was placed on strengthening the security of the nation’s
aviation enterprise. (Wallace, 2014). Those measures consist of a combination
of seen and unseen technics designated to provide mitigation strategies to the
threat of terrorist attacks on airports and airplanes. Some of the strategies
that are being used to minimize the odds of exploiting insiders to take part in
any evil plan include random employee screening, intelligence, crew vetting, enhanced
background checks, and usage of transportation security inspectors. Also,
flight crews are trained to identify suspicious items on board and mandated to
follow specific guidelines while conducting a security check. The TSA security
inspectors are also testing crewmembers often by hiding suspicious items that
need to be detected are reported by the crew.
Transportation Security Administration. (2017). Inside Look: TSA Layers Of Security. Retrieved from https://www.tsa.gov/blog/2017/08/01/inside-look-tsa-layers-security
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