Most airport workers get to skip security

Only three airports in America — in Atlanta, Miami, and Orlando — require airport employees to go through full security, TSA administrator Robert Neffenger acknowledged this week in a Senate Commerce Committee hearing.

In hundreds of other airports across the United States, workers typically swipe a badge to access secure areas, though Neffenger said his agency was in the process of reviewing best practices at these three airports to implement new requirements nationwide.

However, a 2015 report from the Aviation Security Advisory Committee (ASAC), which advises the TSA on airport security practices, concluded that complete employee screening would be costly without being particularly effective to "lower overall risk," because it "is incapable of determining a person’s motivations, attitudes, and capabilities to cause harm, among other limitations." Of course, by that logic, we should nix the TSA altogether, as the same limitations surely apply to the agency's notoriously invasive, unequal, and insecure screening procedures for airline passengers.

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