Gov’t report: Airports need more help keeping intruders out

While intruders routinely breach the security fences protecting runways and planes at U.S. airports, the federal Transportation Security Administration is not keeping up with the threat or doing enough to help airports identify their vulnerabilities, according to a government report released Tuesday.

Congress asked the U.S. Government Accountability Office to investigate how often people get past airport perimeter security, and whether the TSA could do more to help airports anticipate and prevent incidents.

Using TSA data, the accountability office identified over 2,500 security incidents in each of the past three years at the nation’s roughly 440 commercial airports. Those incidents ranged from people jumping fences to reach jets and passenger terminals to workers who forgot their security badges piggy-backing with a colleague through checkpoints.

The report notes that the nation’s medium and small airports, which typically have less money to invest in perimeter security, have plenty of incidents — but do not undergo the “joint vulnerability assessments” that large airports receive every three years from the TSA and FBI.

The findings come several days after The Associated Press updated its ongoing investigation of perimeter security breaches at 31 of the nation’s busiest airports. AP reported that the breaches happened more often than authorities first acknowledged, and remained as frequent as ever in the past year despite investments to fortify outer defenses at some airports.

Airports responded that no incident involved a known terrorist plot, and many intruders do not make it deep into airfields. Several airports also tried to suppress the release of information about breaches.

AP’s investigation identified 345 perimeter security breaches from the start of 2004 through mid-February at those 31 airports, with an average of one every 10 days starting in 2012. The new federal report focused on October 2008 through October 2015. Due to changes with TSA’s data-keeping, the accountability office did not give specific numbers — but a chart summarizing security incidents showed they have ranged between about 2,200 and about 2,800 annually, with the past three federal fiscal years being higher than the previous four.