Ham on Wry Award-TSA Bungles Security Screening Again

Olajide Oluwaseun Noibi has discovered the cheapest way to fly: don't pay for the ticket and use someone else's boarding pass.  Noibi, a Nigerian national, used expired student ID from the University of Michigan  to make it through the initial checkpoint and the full security screening conducted by TSA.  Apparently, TSA considers 95-year-old women in wheel chairs much more dangerous than passengers without a valid boarding pass.or ID  Security agents can successfully identify a strange mass in a woman's Depends undergarment, but they can't  recognize a day-old boarding pass in another person's name, or an expired student ID.   Do you feel safer now?

This latest foul-up boggles the mind, and, it happened not once, but twice.  Noibi successfully boarded a Virgin Atlantic flight at JFK headed for LAX and wasn't discovered as a non-ticketed passenger until approximately halfway through the journey, when a flight attendant noticed he was sitting in an unassigned seat and asked to see his boarding pass.  After stalling for a few minutes, he handed her a pass that the ticketed passenger had lost on a subway the day before.  When he arrived at LAX, an FBI questioned and released him after determining that he posed no threat.

Five days later, Noibi used the same tactic again and made it through TSA a second time, but was arrested when he attempted to board a Delta flight.  Ten additional fraudulent boarding passes were found in his luggage, and he was scheduled for a hearing today.  This man knows no fear, it seems.

We can chuckle over this, but it exposes a serious problem with TSA screening.  They concentrate too much on exact rules and regulations and not enough on people exhibiting suspicious behavior.  As I did in the post dated June 27, 2011, I call for a review of TSA's policies and procedures.  It's time for some major changes when a harmless older woman is pulled aside for a full search and a man who could have been a terrorist makes it through security and boards a flight without proper identification and a valid boarding pass.  John S. Pistole should be held accountable for this breach and made to examine the procedures to improve them.  Otherwise, children and seniors will continue to suffer unwarranted embarrassment in the screening process while suspicious people make it through.  Check out what the former head of Israeli Airport Security said about TSA by clicking the link below.
http://deadlinelive.info/2011/06/29/tsa-is-a-joke-says-former-head-of-israeli-airport-security/