Sen. Lieberman Holds a Hearing on Rail and Transit Security

What that allowed us to do is have someone already in place in that fusion center who we then could ask focus on the surface transportation, focus on the rail. And we've already had two cases since then of potential rail tampering -- of potential rail gate tampering...

LIEBERMAN: Right.

BOYNTON: ... in neighboring areas but through the collaboration between fusion centers because we have the luxury of someone who focuses on that, but -- but that's something that was in place two years ago, which helped us now.

LIEBERMAN: So was there an event that led to that occurrence two years ago, or was it an administrative decision that some level TSA or state?

BOYNTON: It was an administrative decision between the federal security director for TSA at Bradley...

LIEBERMAN: Right.

BOYNTON: ... and the commissioner of homeland security. It was the previous TSA federal security director that...

LIEBERMAN: What was his name?

BOYNTON: I think that was Boynton.

LIEBERMAN: Boynton.

BOYNTON: Yeah.

LIEBERMAN: Thank you, OK. My time is up.

(LAUGHTER) COLLINS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Pistole, I want to start with something that Dr. Flynn raised to end his testimony. He said that the first rule is to avoid alienating the very public that security officials are obligated to protect.

As you know, there has been some criticism of TSA over the years, most recently about the selection of a small child to be patted down, but also people raising questions about why a very elderly person who may be disabled has to go through such scrutiny. Is TSA considering any actions that would focus more on a risk analysis using intelligence to select individuals for secondary screening?

PISTOLE: Thank you, Senator. And -- and I agree with -- with that point in terms of not alienating the public that we're trying to protect. The challenge, as we know, becomes in the practical application of that.

And to your point, we, in TSA, since last fall -- actually before the Thanksgiving issues arose, looking at a risk-based security initiative to do exactly what you have described to try to identify those that we know something more about whether they are frequent flyers, whether they hold top secret security clearances, whether they -- based on the intelligence we know, do not fit in the category such as a very young or perhaps very old who we could expedite their screening at airport checkpoints.

That would then allow us to spend more time with those that we do -- that we do not know very much about other than what's in a secured flight -- the three data fields, the name, date of birth, and gender, which allows us to compare to the chair's watch list so we obviously want to spend the most time on those who would be selectees.

But then in the next category, I would say we want to spend as much time -- as much as possible on those that we don't know much about. And then the least bound time, frankly, using a risk-based approach to say this person has traveled 100,000 miles in the last year. She's done that -- she has done that for the last 20 years. What is the possibility for being a terrorist? It's very small, so let's treat her in that regard.

So it incorporates some of the aspects that is what's known as trusted travelers, known traveler programs, and some other aspects of that. So we've had a fair amount of discussions with the industry about that. There's a -- there's a great deal of interest whether you talk about a checkpoint of the future that one association is promoting.

There is a lot of technology aspects to it, but a lot can be done right now with enhanced behavior detection and information that passengers are willing to share with us.

COLLINS: Thank you.

I support the TSA and DHS's expansion of the See Something, Say Something campaign. And indeed, mass transit systems have been using this for quite -- some many years. New York City subways, for example, have to have that for nearly a decade since after the attacks.

I mentioned in my opening statement that Senator Lieberman and I authored the law to give immunity to individuals who make such reports as long as they make them to the proper authorities and act in good faith, and this was in response to an infamous case involving U.S. Airways where passengers did just that, and then the airline, its crew and some of the passengers got sued.