Government officials imposed stricter airport security measures after the failed Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit. Such breakdowns are rare, officials said, but a government report released in October shows breaches at U.S. airports nearly doubled over five years. “That’s only the breaches we know about,” said Mike Boyd, president of the Colorado-based aviation consulting firm Boyd Group International. The Transportation Security Administration reported 1,442 security breaches at the nation’s 450 commercial airports in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2004, according to the Government Accountability Office report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Statistics from the 2009 fiscal year weren’t included because the GAO released its report just after that fiscal year ended.<\/p>\n
“While some breaches may represent dry runs by terrorists or others to test security or criminal incidents involving airport workers, most are accidental,” the report said.<\/p>\n
Joe Terrell, TSA’s federal security director at Pittsburgh International Airport, said through a spokeswoman no breaches occurred at the Findlay airport since he assumed his post in August 2005.<\/p>\n
In that incident, a woman squeezed through a 1-foot gap between a checkpoint metal detector and an X-ray machine and continued to the airside terminal, where she boarded a flight to Houston. She got by because the nearest TSA screener — overseeing two checkpoint lines — was dealing with another woman who tried the same stunt.<\/p>\n
In its report, the GAO said airports have several secure areas with varying levels of security. They include baggage loading areas, exterior areas near terminals and what the TSA calls air operations areas, including the airfield; areas near parked aircraft; and air cargo and aircraft maintenance facilities, the report said.<\/p>\n
Pittsburgh International Airport is situated on more than 9,000 largely wooded acres, making it one of the largest airports in the country by area — and an attractive hunting ground for overzealous hunters. Hunters who go over or under the perimeter fence surrounding the airport’s 9,000 acres would have to go beyond a second fence around the air operating area to breach security, he said.<\/p>\n
Davis also attributed the jump in breaches nationally to heightened awareness or enforcement triggered by high-profile breaches elsewhere; management changes; and increased, random government inspections of airport security.<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.pittsburghlive.com\/x\/pittsburghtrib\/news\/cityregion\/s_661513.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trends"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2240"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4727,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2240\/revisions\/4727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cybersecurityinstitute.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}