Hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee - Progress on H.R. 1, Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007

Interview

Hearing of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee - Progress on H.R. 1, Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007

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SEN. JOHN THUNE (R-SD): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for holding the hearing. And thank you, our panelists, for being here today and providing some testimony and what is valuable input on TSA's progress toward carrying out the important piece of legislation that was passed, the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007.

We've got about nine billion, I think, passengers each year that use mass transit -- about two million a day that fly on the airlines. So obviously we have a lot of citizens who depend up on accessible, affordable, and efficient travel both for commerce and leisure. And the same things that we're concerned about in terms of our vulnerability to terrorist attacks -- those things, even though we've got safeguards and everything in place, continue to be a concern to a lot of people who travel. And obviously we want to take every precaution, but try and do it in a way that provides as much ease and convenience for people that are traveling as possible.

One question I have with regard to that, Mr. Hawley, is: Can the TSA implement the provisions of the 9/11 Act while at the same time making the airline passenger pre-screening process more efficient and passenger friendly?

MR. HAWLEY: I think that the parts in the 9/11 implementation bill that relate to passenger screening will put us in the right direction. In other words, the Secure Flight, the watch list matching -- those programs I think will have an immediate -- when Secure Flight is up -- will have an immediate, positive enormous effect by eliminating the people who are not on the watch list who are somehow told that they are or think that they are. And when that issue goes away I think it will elevate the spirit of the traveling public, as well as protect the security of the list.

So we've got some technology that we need to roll out that we've already started rolling out for passenger checkpoints. So all of those things are going to go toward de-cluttering the checkpoint, calming the environment down so it's not as much of a crush and that gives us better security. It also gives a better experience.

SEN. THUNE: How close are we to using some of the biometric identifiers? You talked about technology. How far out is that? And are these short-term or long-term objectives for TSA?

MR. HAWLEY: The ones I mentioned are short-term, immediate-term and they're happening now. On the biometrics -- it's one of the criticisms in the GAO report is that we haven't deployed the biometrics in the airport environment, so that clearly is the next piece for us. We've got the -- on the port environment the TWIC card enrollments are going on now. So that is the sophistic biometric. The standards are set. And we're working with the airport community to get -- the difficulty is the interoperable card so that, as required in the 9/11 bill, when we're talking about flight crews, that there be interoperability from airport to airport. It's much easier to do one airport, but it's much more complicated to have the one issue here work at the other. So that's the problem that we're working through, but I think you put your finger on it. That is a critical next step in aviation security.

SEN. THUNE: How -- and what -- when you say short-term, what long-term time frame -- what is the time frame on that, would you say?

MR. HAWLEY: The biometrics have been much more difficult to implement than any of us expected. And TWIC, as everybody knows, has taken longer than any of us would have liked. It is the most sophisticated interoperable biometric system in the world, and so expanding that into the aviation environment is not trivial, but I think we've solved most of the problems. We now have to figure out, okay, how do we actually implement it and how do we make the backend connect to our watch list checking in a way that allows us to process it all smoothly.

SEN. THUNE: Is the interoperability -- that you referred to in being able to integrate this in all the airports around the country -- the limitation on that? Is that a technology limitation or a funding limitation? Is it a matter of not having enough money to make that --

MR. HAWLEY: It's first the technology and the operational integration from the -- there's nothing that needs to be invented, but fitting the pieces together is the difficult part. And then the money -- we'll have a big debate about the money, but I think all of us agree it has to happen and the airport's been a great partner in it and we'll work that out.

SEN. THUNE: Ms. Berrick, some of the critics of the U.S. Aviation Security Policy argue that there's been too much emphasis given to previous attack scenarios -- for example, hijackings, luggage bombs, those sorts of things. Do you agree with that assessment? And why or why not, I guess.

MS. BERRICK: Yeah, well, in most of our work we look at to what extent TSA's using threat information -- current threat information to drive their decision. And generally we're finding that they do do that, and of course, they consider past threats and try to mitigate those. They also look forward: What are the current threats and where should we be moving, you know, in the next five to 10 years? So generally we've seen that they've done that.

Related to making risk-based decisions, the area where we've probably identified they could do more work, as related to doing vulnerability assessments on how vulnerable are we against imperious threats, but they've done vulnerability assessments in a lot of different areas. We've reported that we think they can strengthen their efforts to look at how vulnerable we are. But pretty consistently in almost all of our work we found that TSA has incorporated threat information -- again, not just past threat information, but looking forward to help drive their decisions and priorities.

SEN. THUNE: Okay.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

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