dynagirl

The private security firm hired to protect San Francisco’s airport is being sued for cheating — when a federal decoy agent would try to slip past them to test the system, they’d alert other guards and end up with a falsely high catch rating, so that they’d keep their very lucrative contract. Read the whole article.

Almost always, Bencomo said, the screeners would fail to detect the decoy. Once the decoy was through the checkpoint, he would identify himself to security personnel and inform them they had failed the audit. After that, the decoy would typically go to other checkpoints and try to penetrate security there, too.

According to the lawsuit, Covenant told checkpoint supervisors in 2004 to phone in a report to the airport Security Control Center when a decoy had penetrated security, along with a physical description of the decoy, the sort of weapon he had and where it was concealed.

Covenant personnel then would track the decoy on a battery of 1,200 closed-circuit television cameras, while supervisors followed him through the airport. When the decoy approached another checkpoint, supervisors would alert security personnel, Bencomo said.

Once the gate supervisor had the decoy’s description, “you’d send one of your screeners to find him in the line,” Bencomo said. “Then you’d put him in the secondary screening line” and use the metal-detecting wand to find the decoy’s weapon. The system allowed the firm to run up high scores on the tests, he said.

Meanwhile, he said, ordinary passengers at SFO often managed to take inappropriate items through the checkpoints. On Nov. 17, 2004, a passenger on a flight from SFO to Los Angeles approached a flight attendant, handed her box- cutters and said, “You missed this,” the lawsuit said.