TSA draws travelers' complaints

In May, TSA improved the way it handles complaints and now has a more accurate and complete database for them, Howe said. She said screeners have been disciplined as a result of complaints but said privacy laws prevent her from providing more detail about these incidents.

Out of all the contacts TSA receives, only about 2 percent are complaints, Howe said. In September, for instance, TSA received 1,253 complaints out of 68,540 total contacts. Most people contact TSA to ask what items they can bring aboard the aircraft.

Howe also defended the agency's 43,000 screeners and said the public needs to know that they are "good people motivated by the mission."

"Our officers take a lot of disrespect from the public," Howe said. "These people are on the front lines and they deserve our respect."

Screeners make about $30,000 a year.

Bill Lyons, the union official who is trying organize screeners and get them bargaining rights, said many problems arise because TSA has understaffed the checkpoints. Lyons, of the American Federation of Government Employees, said operating procedures change regularly and many screeners are not told of the changes. Supervisors often give conflicting instructions, he said.

"These folks are under tremendous pressure," Lyons said.

TSA says each airport makes its own staffing decisions. Administrator Kip Hawley acknowledges the public's frustrations with the screening system.

"You have 2 million people a day jamming into these congested checkpoints and chewing through the magnetometer," Hawley said. "Clearly that's not the best way. And so the trick is how do we — without disrupting the system — get to a more spread out, calmer security process where people aren't so jammed up, aren't so tense."

Hawley said deploying new technology and new screening techniques — which TSA is already doing — moves in that direction.

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Behavioral observation and document checking are proving to be the most successful in rooting out would-be terrorists, Hawley said. Screeners do catch people who try to bring guns onto planes. "But they're not terrorists. They're just stupid," he said. Terrorists know better than to try to bring prohibited items through security, he said.

TSA's security decisions are driven by intelligence on threats to the aviation sector. Hawley gets briefed on the threat every morning, and information from those briefings has led to changes in screening policies.

Earlier this year, for instance, TSA warned travelers that screeners would be paying closer attention to remote-control toys, because of unspecific information about terrorists using such toys to detonate bombs. And the agency began deploying behavior-detection officers in airports across the country, because intelligence has shown that there is no "common face" for a terrorist.

That means whether someone is nervous or uncomfortable is more reliable as a sign of risk than judging people by their looks, said Bill Gaches, head of TSA's global strategies division.

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