From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov

Transcript for: Aviation Security and Expedited Passenger Screening

Description: Audio interview by GAO staff with Jennifer Grover,
Director, Homeland Security and Justice

Related GAO Work: GAO-15-150: Aviation Security: Rapid Growth in
Expedited Passenger Screening Highlights Need to Plan Effective Security
Assessments

Released: December 2014

[ Background Music ]

[ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and
information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It's
December 2014. In 2011 the Transportation Security Administration
introduced its pre-check programs, which offers expedited screening to
selected air travelers. A team led by Jennifer Grover, a director in
GAO's Homeland Security and Justice team, recently looked at how TSA's
pre-check program has been working since then. GAO's Jacques Arsenault
sat down with Jennifer to talk about what they found.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] What exactly is expedited screening? How is TSA's
use of it changed?

[ Jennifer Grover: ] Well traditionally, most airline passengers
received the same level of screening. So that's the experience that you
have when you go to the airport and you either walk through the metal
detector or the AIT body scanner, and your carry-on luggage is screened
through the x-ray machine. But about two years ago, TSA started offering
expedited screening to low-risk passengers. And what makes that
different is that passengers are allowed to keep on their shoes and
their light jackets, and they can generally leave their liquids and
their laptops in the carry-on case. This is called the pre-check
program. TSA's use of pre-check really has grown exponentially in the
past  year because they have started using some new ways to identify
passengers who could be eligible for expedited screening.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] Great, can you talk about these new ways? What
are the methods that TSA uses to identify people that would be eligible?

[ Jennifer Grover: ] Well there's three main ways. First is people can
be a pre-check member because they've applied through one of TSA's
enrollment centers. Or because they have an association with a specific
group, such as federal judges or members of Congress or someone who's
active duty military. The second way to be eligible for expedited
screening is through automatic risk assessments of all passengers that
TSA has started doing. The new process generates a risk score for every
airline passenger. And depending on your risk score, you may be eligible
for a pre-check for that specific flight. And you'll know that's
happened if you print out your boarding pass and you see pre-check on
it, even though you hadn't previously signed up for the pre-check
program. And then the third way is through a new process that TSA is
using at the airport called managed inclusion. And this is where TSA
randomly selects passengers from the regular screening lane, moves them
into the expedited screening lane. Now they do this primarily to make
more efficient use of those pre-check lanes when otherwise there
wouldn't be too many people going through the lane. I mean I should
mention that TSA has put additional layers of security in place when
they're operating the manage inclusion process, because they are taking
passengers who are supposed to receive regular screening and moving them
through an expedited screening lane.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] So then what recommendations is GAO making to TSA
to improve pre-check?

[ Jennifer Grover: ] Well the most important recommendation is related
to that managed inclusion process that we were just talking about. So,
TSA hasn't tested the process as a whole to make sure that it's working
as intended. They have done some testing on some of the individual
additional layers of security, but it's really important that they test
the process as a whole to make sure that people are receiving an
appropriate level of screening. And in the past, TSA hasn't done a good
job of testing similar systems. So what we're recommending is that as
they go forward with the testing, they should make sure that they follow
sound practices for study design so that at the end of the day they'll
have reliable test results.

[ Jacques Arsenault: ] So then finally, if I'm going to head to the
airport and get on a plane, what would you say is the bottom line of
this report?

[ Jennifer Grover: ] Well, two things really. First TSA is trying to
move away from one size fits all approach to screening. And we found
that as many as 40% of airline passengers were receiving expedited
screening. So don't be surprised if you find that you have an
opportunity to experience pre-check. The second piece of that though is
that since we all benefit from strong security, it is really important
for TSA to ensure that all aspects of expedited screening, including
this managed inclusion process, are working as intended. So over the
next year or so, GAO will be tracking TSA's progress in that area.

[ Background Music ]

[ Narrator: ] To learn more, visit GAO.gov and be sure to tune in to the
next episode of GAO's Watchdog Report for more from the congressional
watchdog, the U.S. Government Accountability Office.